PARAMETRIC ANALYSIS OF MOLTEN SALT NATURAL CIRCULATION LOOP IN ADVANCE NUCLEAR REACTOR USING COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS

• Main Author: Dahana Saputra, Rahmad
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/83447
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Generation IV nuclear reactor is designed with a passive safety system that can start without external power or human intervention. Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) is one of the generation IV nuclear reactor that have natural circulation as its passive safety system. A simulation study on pentagon natural circulation loop is done in this research using ANSYS Fluent which is a computational fluid dynamics software based on finite volume method. First, the simulation model is validated by mesh independence test and comparing its flow parameter with previous study. A mesh with 0.7 mm dimension is accurate enough to represent the flow and have an optimal computational cost. The flow parameter have < 3.5% error compared to previous study, its mean that the model can be used for further study. Next a variation of heater and cooler temperature is done to see its effect for the flow parameter on FLiBe, FLiNaK, and FNaB molten salt. It is observed that the cold leg temperature (t1) and hot leg temperature (t3) is proportional with the heater and cooler temperature. t1 is affected more by the increase of cooler terperature while t3 is affected more by the heater temperature. The flow Reynolds number is also obtained for each salt at every heater-cooler variation. Last, FNaBe molten salt is added for comparison analysis of the flow parameter at constant cooler temperature and constant heater temperature. It is observed that FNaB have the highest Reynolds number at all condition due to its low viscosity. A correlation of t1 and t3 temperature with the flow velocity is also observed for each molten salt.