Study of natural circulation for the design of a research reactor using computational fluid dynamics and evolutionary computation techniques

Safety is one of the most important and desirable characteristics in a nuclear plant Natural circulation cooling systems are noted for providing passive safety. These systems can be used as mechanism for removing the residual heat from the reactor, or even as the main cooling system for heated sections, such as the core. In this work, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code called CFX is used to simulate the process of natural circulation in a research reactor pool after its shutdown. The physical model studied is similar to the Open Pool Australian Light water reactor (OPAL), and contains the core, cooling pool, reflecting tank, circulation pipes and chimney. For best computing performance, the core region was modeled as a porous medium, where the parameters were obtained from a separately detailed CFD analysis. This work also aims to study the viability of the implementation of Differential Evolution algorithm for optimization the physical and operational parameters that, obeying the laws of similarity, lead to a test section on a reduced scale of the reactor pool.