CFD Analysis of Thermally Stratified Flow and Conjugate Heat Transfer in a PWR Pressurizer Surgeline

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jong Chull Jo ◽  
Dong Gu Kang

Temperature gradients in the thermally stratified fluid flowing through a pipe may cause undesirable excessive thermal stresses at the pipe wall in the axial, circumferential, and radial directions, which can eventually lead to damages such as deformation, support failure, thermal fatigue, cracking, etc., to the piping systems. Several nuclear power plants have so far experienced such unwelcome mechanical damages to the pressurizer surgeline, feedwater nozzle, high pressure safety injection lines, or residual heat removal lines at a pressurized water reactor (PWR). In this regard, determining with accuracy the transient temperature distributions in the wall of a piping system subjected to internally thermal stratification is the essential prerequisite for the assessment of the structural integrity of such a piping system. In this study, to realistically predict the transient temperature distributions in the wall of an actual PWR pressurizer surgeline with a complex geometry of three-dimensionally bent piping, three-dimensional transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations involving the conjugate heat transfer analysis are performed for the PWR pressurizer surgeline subjected to either out- or in-surge flows using a commercial CFD code. In addition, the wall temperature distributions obtained by taking into account the existence of wall thickness are compared with those by neglecting it to identify some requirements for a realistic and conservative thermal analysis from a safety viewpoint.

Author(s):  
Dong Gu Kang ◽  
Jong Chull Jo

Temperature gradients in the thermally stratified fluid flowing through a pipe may cause undesirable excessive thermal stresses at the pipe wall in the axial, circumferential, and radial directions, which can eventually lead to damages such as deformation, support failure, thermal fatigue, cracking, etc. to the piping systems. Several nuclear power plants have so far experienced such unwelcome mechanical damages to the pressurizer surge lines, feedwater nozzle, high pressure safety injection lines, or residual heat removal lines. In this regard, to determine the transient temperature distributions in the wall of a piping system subjected to internally thermal stratification with accuracy is the essential prerequisite for the assessment of the structural integrity of the piping system subjected to internally thermal stratification. In this study, to predict the transient temperature distributions in the wall of PWR pressurizer surge line with a complex geometry of 3-dimensionally bent piping realistically, 3-dimensional transient CFD calculations involving the conjugate heat transfer analysis are performed for the actual PWR pressurizer surge line subjected to stratified internal flows either during out-surge or in-surge operation using a commercial CFD code. In addition, the wall temperature distributions obtained by taking account of the existence of wall thickness as it is are compared with those by neglecting the existence of wall thickness to identify some requirements for a realistic and conservative thermal analysis.


2012 ◽  
Vol 468-471 ◽  
pp. 78-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athar Rasool ◽  
Zhong Ning Sun ◽  
Jian Jun Wang ◽  
Zeng Fang Ge ◽  
Majid Ali

Thermal stratification effects have been a great concern in a pressurizer surge line of pressurized water reactor (PWR) since 1988. These effects may damage the structural integrity and contribute in reducing the operational life time of pressurizer surge line. Several nuclear power plants operators have so far reported such mechanical damages. To realistically assess the structural integrity of pressurizer surge line subjected to thermal stratification, it is necessary to analyze the transient temperature distribution. Several researchers and scholars have carried out considerable efforts to determine the temperature distributions in the pressurizer surge line. In this study, an effort has been made to simulate the behavior of thermally stratified flow and predict the transient temperature distributions in the pressurizer surge line realistically. To obtain realistic results for such complex geometry of pressurizer surge line 3D analysis is performed using CFX commercially available CFD software. The transient temperature distributions obtained are presented and discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 180 ◽  
pp. 02096 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Sosnowski ◽  
Jaroslaw Krzywanski ◽  
Karolina Grabowska ◽  
Renata Gnatowska

Computational methods have been widely applied in conjugate heat transfer analysis. The very first and crucial step in such research is the meshing process which consists in dividing the analysed geometry into numerous small control volumes (cells). In Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications it is desirable to use the hexahedral cells as the resulting mesh is characterized by low numerical diffusion. Unfortunately generating such mesh can be a very time-consuming task and in case of complicated geometry - it may not be possible to generate cells of good quality. Therefore tetrahedral cells have been implemented into commercial pre-processors. Their advantage is the ease of its generation even in case of very complex geometry. On the other hand tetrahedrons cannot be stretched excessively without decreasing the mesh quality factor, so significantly larger number of cells has to be used in comparison to hexahedral mesh in order to achieve a reasonable accuracy. Moreover the numerical diffusion of tetrahedral elements is significantly higher. Therefore the polyhedral cells are proposed within the paper in order to combine the advantages of hexahedrons (low numerical diffusion resulting in accurate solution) and tetrahedrons (rapid semi-automatic generation) as well as to overcome the disadvantages of both the above mentioned mesh types. The major benefit of polyhedral mesh is that each individual cell has many neighbours, so gradients can be well approximated. Polyhedrons are also less sensitive to stretching than tetrahedrons which results in better mesh quality leading to improved numerical stability of the model. In addition, numerical diffusion is reduced due to mass exchange over numerous faces. This leads to a more accurate solution achieved with a lower cell count. Therefore detailed comparison of numerical modelling results concerning conjugate heat transfer using tetrahedral and polyhedral meshes is presented in the paper.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 2096
Author(s):  
Joon Ahn ◽  
Jeong Chul Song ◽  
Joon Sik Lee

Large eddy simulations are performed to analyze the conjugate heat transfer of turbulent flow in a ribbed channel with a heat-conducting solid wall. An immersed boundary method (IBM) is used to determine the effect of heat transfer in the solid region on that in the fluid region in a unitary computational domain. To satisfy the continuity of the heat flux at the solid–fluid interface, effective conductivity is introduced. By applying the IBM, it is possible to fully couple the convection on the fluid side and the conduction inside the solid and use a dynamic subgrid scale model in a Cartesian grid. The blockage ratio (e/H) is set at 0.1, which is typical for gas turbine blades. Through conjugate heat transfer analysis, it is confirmed that the heat transfer peak in front of the rib occurs because of the impinging of the reattached flow and not the influence of the thermal boundary condition. When the rib turbulator acts as a fin, its efficiency and effectiveness are predicted to be 98.9% and 8.32, respectively. When considering conjugate heat transfer, the total heat transfer rate is reduced by 3% compared with that of the isothermal wall. The typical Biot number at the internal cooling passage of a gas turbine is <0.1, and the use of the rib height as the characteristic length better represents the heat transfer of the rib.


Author(s):  
Si-Hwa Jeong ◽  
Min-Gu Won ◽  
Nam-Su Huh ◽  
Yun-Jae Kim ◽  
Young-Jin Oh ◽  
...  

In this paper, the thermal stress characteristics of the pipe-in-pipe (PIP) system under high temperature condition are analyzed. The PIP is a type of pipe applied in sodium-cooled faster reactor (SFR) and has a different geometry from a single pipe. In particular, under the high temperature condition of the SFR, the high thermal stress is generated due to the temperature gradient occurring between the inner pipe and outer pipe. To investigate the thermal stress characteristics, three cases are considered according to geometry of the support. The fully constrained support and intermediate support are considered for case 1 and 2, respectively. For case 3, both supports are applied to the actual curved pipe. The finite element (FE) analyses are performed in two steps for each case. Firstly, the heat transfer analysis is carried out considering the thermal conduction, convection and radiation conditions. From the heat transfer analysis, the temperature distribution results in the piping system are obtained. Secondly, the structural analysis is performed considering the temperature distribution results and boundary conditions. Finally, the effects of the geometric characteristics on the thermal stress in the PIP system are analyzed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abas Abdoli ◽  
George S. Dulikravich ◽  
Genesis Vasquez ◽  
Siavash Rastkar

Two-layer single phase flow microchannels were studied for cooling of electronic chips with a hot spot. A chip with 2.45 × 2.45 mm footprint and a hot spot of 0.5 × 0.5 mm in its center was studied in this research. Two different cases were simulated in which heat fluxes of 1500 W cm−2 and 2000 W cm−2 were applied at the hot spot. Heat flux of 1000 W cm−2 was applied on the rest of the chip. Each microchannel layer had 20 channels with an aspect ratio of 4:1. Direction of the second microchannel layer was rotated 90 deg with respect to the first layer. Fully three-dimensional (3D) conjugate heat transfer analysis was performed to study the heat removal capacity of the proposed two-layer microchannel cooling design for high heat flux chips. In the next step, a linear stress analysis was performed to investigate the effects of thermal stresses applied to the microchannel cooling design due to variations of temperature field. Results showed that two-layer microchannel configuration was capable of removing heat from high heat flux chips with a hot spot.


Author(s):  
Magdalena Jaremkiewicz

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of determining the transient temperature of the inner surface of thick-walled elements. The method can be used to determine thermal stresses in pressure elements. Design/methodology/approach An inverse marching method is proposed to determine the transient temperature of the thick-walled element inner surface with high accuracy. Findings Initially, the inverse method was validated computationally. The comparison between the temperatures obtained from the solution for the direct heat conduction problem and the results obtained by means of the proposed inverse method is very satisfactory. Subsequently, the presented method was validated using experimental data. The results obtained from the inverse calculations also gave good results. Originality/value The advantage of the method is the possibility of determining the heat transfer coefficient at a point on the exposed surface based on the local temperature distribution measured on the insulated outer surface. The heat transfer coefficient determined experimentally can be used to calculate thermal stresses in elements with a complex shape. The proposed method can be used in online computer systems to monitor temperature and thermal stresses in thick-walled pressure components because the computing time is very short.


Author(s):  
Christoph Starke ◽  
Erik Janke ◽  
Toma´sˇ Hofer ◽  
Davide Lengani

Recent development in commercial CFD codes offers possibilities to include the solid body in order to perform conjugate heat transfer computations for complex geometries. The current paper aims to analyse the differences between a conjugate heat transfer computation and conventional uncoupled approaches where a heat transfer coefficient is first derived from a flow solution and then taken as boundary condition for a thermal conduction analysis of the solid part. Whereas the thermal analyses are done with a Rolls-Royce in-house finite element code, the CFD as well as the conjugate heat transfer computation are done using the new version 8 of the commercial code Fine Turbo from Numeca International. The analysed geometry is a turbine cascade that was tested by VKI in Brussels within the European FP6 project AITEB 2. First, the paper presents the aerodynamic results. The pure flow solutions are validated against pressure measurements of the cascade test. Then, the heat transfer from flow computations with wall temperature boundary conditions is compared to the measured heat transfer. Once validated, the heat transfer coefficients are used as boundary condition for three uncoupled thermal analyses of the blade to predict its surface temperatures in a steady state. The results are then compared to a conjugate heat transfer method. Therefore, a mesh of the solid blade was added to the validated flow computation. The paper will present and compare the results of conventional uncoupled thermal analyses with different strategies for the wall boundary condition to results of a conjugate heat transfer computation. As it turns out, the global results are similar but especially the over-tip region with its complex geometry and flow structure and where effective cooling is crucial shows remarkable differences because the conjugate heat transfer solution predicts lower blade tip temperatures. This will be explained by the missing coupling between the fluid and the solid domain.


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