Inter-subchannel heat transfer modeling for a subchannel analysis of liquid metal-cooled reactors

In a subchannel approach, the temperature, pressure and velocity in a subchannel are averaged, and one representative thermal-hydraulic condition specifies the state of a subchannel. To enhance the predictability of a subchannel analysis code, it is required to model the inter-subchannel heat transfer between the adjacent subchannels as accurately as possible. One of the critical parameters which determine the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the coolant in subchannels is the heat conduction between two neighboring sub-channels. This portion of a heat transfer becomes more important in the design of an LMR (Liquid Metal-cooled Reactor) because of the high heat capacity of the liquid metal coolant. The other important part of heat transfer is the mixing of flow as a form of cross flow. Especially, the turbulent mixing caused by the eddy motion of fluid across the gap between the subchannels enhances the exchange of the momentum and the energy through the gap with no net transport of the mass. Major results of recent efforts on these modeling have been implemented in a subchannel analysis code MATRA-LMR-FB. The analysis shows that the accuracy of a subchannel analysis code is improved by enhancing the models describing the conduction heat transfer and the cross-flow mixing, especially at low flow rate. (authors)