Theoretical and experimental studies of heavy liquid metal thermal hydraulics. Proceedings of a technical meeting

Through the Nuclear Energy Department's Technical Working Group on Fast Reactors (TWG-FR), the IAEA provides a forum for exchange of information on national programmes, collaborative assessments, knowledge preservation, and cooperative research in areas agreed by the Member States with fast reactor and partitioning and transmutation development programmes (e.g. accelerator driven systems (ADS)). Trends in advanced fast reactor and ADS designs and technology development are periodically summarized in status reports, symposia, and seminar proceedings prepared by the IAEA to provide all interested IAEA Member States with balanced and objective information. The use of heavy liquid metals (HLM) is rapidly diffusing in different research and industrial fields. The detailed knowledge of the basic thermal hydraulics phenomena associated with their use is a necessary step for the development of the numerical codes to be used in the engineering design of HLM components. This is particularly true in the case of lead or lead-bismuth eutectic alloy cooled fast reactors, high power particle beam targets and in the case of the cooling of accelerator driven sub-critical cores where the use of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) design codes is mandatory. Periodic information exchange within the frame of the TWG-FR has lead to the conclusion that the experience in HLM thermal fluid dynamics with regard to both the theoretical/numerical and experimental fields was limited and somehow dispersed. This is the case, e.g. when considering turbulent exchange phenomena, free-surface problems, and two-phase flows. Consequently, Member States representatives participating in the 35th Annual Meeting of the TWG-FR (Karlsruhe, Germany, 22-26 April 2002) recommended holding a technical meeting (TM) on Theoretical and Experimental Studies of Heavy Liquid Metal Thermal Hydraulics. Following this recommendation, the IAEA has convened the Technical Meeting on Theoretical and Experimental Studies of Heavy Liquid Metal Thermal Hydraulics (28-31 October 2003). The TM was hosted by the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany. The scope of the TM was to provide a global forum for information exchange on the most recent theoretical and experimental studies of HLM thermal hydraulics. The main objective of the TM was to assess the shortcomings of the present CFD codes used for HLM simulation and to identify future research needs, in both the numerical and experimental area