Detail CFD simulation of the integrated reactor pressure vessel of SMART

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the full Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) of SMART with ANSYS CFX 20.2. SMART is a water-cooled SMR designed by KAERI for an operation with forced convection. The thermal power of SMART amounts to 330 MW$_{th}$. In the integrated SMR-concept, the main primary loop components such as the helical steam generators, pressurizer and canned pumps are located inside the RPV. The CFD model uses a concept of full geometrical detail resolution with partial boundary inflation of the mesh and porous media modelling with sources for momentum and energy for components like the core, pumps and steam generators. The detailed results obtained with a steady-state RANS simulation using ANSYS CFX 20.2 are very promising as the comparison of selected core parameters of the CFD-simulation with the ones of the system thermal hydraulic code TRACE have shown

An Advanced TRACE Modeling Approach: Automatic Connection of 3D Cartesian and Cylindrical VESSEL Components in Integral Plant Models

Best estimate system thermal-hydraulic codes in the nuclear engineering community, e.g., TRACE, RELAP3D, CATHARE-3, etc., were extended with 3D coarse-mesh components to better describe the 3D Thermal-Hydraulic (TH) phenomena taking place within the Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) and the core. The RPV is usually shaped like a cylinder while the core is mostly a cube. Hence, the TRACE code is equipped with a Cylindrical VESSEL and a Cartesian VESSEL. The former one is to represent the RPV (including core), pressurizer, and steam generator. The latter one is more appropriate to represent the core. The two components are connected by two Vessel-Junctions (VJ) at the core inlet and outlet. Due to the different nodalization between the two VESSELs, the analyst needs to do repetitive and error-prone work defining the cell-to-cell junctions and their TH parameters. To facilitate this process, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed an automatic approach based on a mesh-constructing and field-mapping library, namely the MEDCoupling. These new capabilities of TRACE are demonstrated by the analysis of the coolant mixing for an academic case and the AP1000 reactor