Measurements of Flow Mixing at Subchannels in a Wire-Wrapped 37-Rod Bundle for a Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor

For a safety analysis in a core thermal design of a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), flow mixing characteristics at subchannels in a wire-wrapped rod bundle are very important. Wrapped wires make a cross flow in a around the fuel rod) of the fuel rod, and this effect lets flow be mixed. Experimental results of flow mixing can be meaningful for verification and validation of thermal mixing correlation in a reactor core thermo-hydraulic design code. A wire mesh sensing technique can be useful method for measuring of flow mixing characteristics. A wire mesh sensor has been traditionally used to measure the void fraction of a two-phase flow field, i.e. gas and liquid. However, it has been recently reported that the wire mesh sensor can be used successfully to recognize the flow field in liquid phase by injecting a tracing liquid with a different level of electric conductivity. This can be powerfully adapted to recognize flow mixing characteristics by wrapped wires in SFR core thermal design. In this work, we conducted the flow mixing experiments using a custom designed wire mesh sensor. To verify and validate computer codes for the SFR core thermal design, mixing experiments were conducted at a hexagonally arrayed 37-pin wire-wrapped fuel rod bundle test section. The well-designed wire mesh sensor was used to measure flow mixing characteristics. The developed post-processing method has its own merits, and flow mixing results were reasonable. In addition, by uncertainty analysis, the system errors and the random error were estimated in experiments. Therefore, the present results and methods can be used for design code verification and validation