Numerical analysis of thermal-hydraulic behavior of supercritical water in vertical upward/downward flow channels

Investigations on the thermal-hydraulic behavior in the SCWR fuel assembly have obtained a significant attention in the international SCWR community. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the heat transfer behavior of supercritical fluids. In this paper, the numerical analysis is carried out to study the thermal-hydraulic behaviour in vertical sub-channels cooled by supercritical water. Remarkable differences in characteristics of secondary flow are found, especially in square lattice, between the upward flow and downward flow. The turbulence mixing across sub-channel gap for downward flow is much stronger than that for upward flow in wide lattice when the bulk temperature is lower than pseudo-critical point temperature. For downward flow, heat transfer deterioration phenomenon is suppressed with respect to the case of upward flow at the same conditions. (authors)