Numerical Study for Turbulent Heat Transfer in Helical Wired Sub-channel Flow Regime of Duct-less Assembly in SFR

A fuel assembly had hexagonal structure adjacent to 6 fuel assemblies, which influence to the target fuel assembly due to elimination of duct. For calculating the influence, 6 additional channels were generated between the adjacent fuel assemblies and cross flow model was applied to the channels. The adjacent fuel assemblies were analyzed and the results were used in the additional channel as boundary condition of the target fuel assembly. To design the specifications of duct-less assembly, modified or brand-new thermal-hydraulic methodology is needed which is using MATRA-LMR and CFD codes in this study. The MATRA-LMR is a sub-channel analysis code for LMR that has been developed in Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. It is designed to analyze a fuel assembly with wire-wrap and duct structure. However, the duct-less core is not able to be analyzed by the MATRA-LMR which doesn't consider cross flow between the fuel assemblies and effect of grid spacer. The code need improvement by editing source code to eliminate effect of duct and analyze pressure drop and mixing between the sub-channels caused by grid spacer and cross flow between the fuel assemblies. To validate reformed pressure drop model and cross flow model in MATRA-LMR, CFD analysis is performed. For verifying the results of CFD, LMR subchannel experimental data is benchmarked which is done by ORNL. The verified CFD for thermalhydraulic analysis calculated pressure drop and mixing caused by grid spacer and cross flow between fuel assemblies