Pressure-Drop Analysis of a Re-Entrant Fuel Channel In a Pressure-Channel Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactor

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to perform a pressure drop analysis across a fuel channel of a SuperCritical Water-cooled Reactor. A re-entrant channel design with a 78-element fuel bundle design was selected to perform the pressure drop calculations. A one-dimensional steady state pressure drop analysis has been performed to investigate the pressure drop resulting from friction, gravity, acceleration and local losses at supercritical conditions. MATLAB was used to create a steady state thermal-hydraulic code which calculates the pressure drop across a 5 meter length heated vertical channel. The total pressure drop across the channel was calculated to 60 kPa.