Computational Fluid Dynamics Investigation of Supercritical Water Flow and Heat Transfer in a Rod Bundle With Grid Spacers

This paper presents a steady-state computational fluid dynamics approach to supercritical water flow and heat transfer in a rod bundle with grid spacers. The current model was developed using the ANSYS Workbench 15.0 software (CFX solver) and was first applied to supercritical water flow and heat transfer in circular tubes. The predicted wall temperature was in good agreement with the measured data. Next, a similar approach was used to investigate three-dimensional (3D) vertical upward flow of water at supercritical pressure of about 25 MPa in a rod bundle with grid spacers. This work aimed at understanding thermo- and hydrodynamic behavior of fluid flow in a complex geometry at specified boundary conditions. The modeled geometry consisted of a 1.5-m heated section in the rod bundle, a 0.2-m nonheated inlet section, and five grid spacers. The computational mesh was prepared using two cell types. The sections of the rods with spacers were meshed using tetrahedral cells due to the complex geometry of the spacer, whereas sections without spacers were meshed with hexahedral cells resulting in a total of 28 million cells. Three different sets of experimental conditions were investigated in this study: a nonheated case and two heated cases. The nonheated case, A1, is calculated to extract the pressure drop across the rod bundle. For cases B1 and B2, a heat flux is applied on the surface of the rods causing a rise in fluid temperature along the bundle. While the temperature of the fluid increases along with the flow, heat deterioration effects can be present near the heated surface. Outputs from both B cases are temperatures at preselected locations on the rods surfaces.