Investigation on the thermal fatigue problem of Gen IV nuclear power plants

• Main Author: Tay, Hui Qun.
• Other Authors: Zhao, Jiyun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53297
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The nuclear industry in the 21st century has caught an increased percentage of the governments’ attention, whether it is for military arsenal or for commercial purposes. With the increasing reliance of world’s electrical source of generation moving gradually to commercial nuclear reactors, safety concerns are a main issue to improved reactor designs, especially after the catastrophic effects of the meltdowns of the Chernobyl in 1986 to the recent Fukushima in 2011. One of the critical components of a nuclear reactor is the cooling system where excess heat energy must be removed effectively in the shortest time possible. This report is targeted at the mixing region in the T-junction within the cooling towers where hot and cold coolants interact, resulting in cyclical thermal stresses on the structural integrity of the pipes. The ANSYS 14.0 Workbench is used together with Solidworks 2011 to model the geometry and simulate the phenomena and its results are then cross referenced with other numerical simulations done with the other software. The differences and threshold conditions of the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model and the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) are also identified in the process. It has also been found that increased mesh resolution and iterations can be done to further improve the accuracies of the results obtained. Future work can be done include the running of the simulation with different coolants and the use of the results of this simulation as a basis for the analysis of the structural integrity of the pipes using the Finite Element Method (FEM).