Corrosion products on fuel cladding surface have a significant impact on reactor operation. These types of deposits are defined as Corrosion Residual Unidentified Deposit (CRUD) and are consist of a porous matrix of nickel and iron based oxides deposited on the fuel cladding surface. It is well known that crud deposits may cause potential Crud Induced Localized Corrosion (CILC) risk and Crud Induced Power Shift (CIPS) risk.
The paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method of predicting the crud effect on the thermal hydraulic performance. The effect of the crud roughness is mainly considered in the simulation, the flow near the wall of the crud is solved by modifying wall function in the prism layer.
The simulation object is a span of typical 17×17 rod bundle with a mid grid in PWR, all the structures including grid straps, springs, dimples, mixing vanes and welding spots are included. Thicknesses of grid and fuel cladding are considered in order to precisely simulate the fluid-solid conjugate heat transfer. The crud is set to be covered on the full span downstream of the grid. The simulation is based on the CILC risk pre-analysis and the computed information in the mostly likely crud deposit position is used as boundary condition.
Based on the simulation results, the crud effects on the flow characteristics including vortex structures, circulation, turbulent intensity and second flow intensity and the heat transfer characteristics including rod temperature, fluid temperature and heat transfer coefficient are discussed in detail.
