Analyse du transfert de chaleur et de la perte de pression pour des écoulements supercritiques dans le réacteur CANDU-SCWR

The supercritical water reactor is one of the six concepts of generation IV nuclear reactors that has been selected by the International Generation IV Forum (GIF). Canada has chosen to conduct advanced research on this type of reactor. For the design and safety analysis of the reactor concept, the development of numerical simulation codes is needed. The ARTHUR code is a thermal-hydraulic computer code developed by Fassi-Fehri (2008), at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, to analyse the CANDU-6 reactor. The purpose of this project is to modify this numerical code so that it can be used to treat the CANDU-SCWR. To calculate the coolant thermal-hydraulics properties in the fuel channel of a CANDU-SCWR, it was assumed that the water flows under supercritical conditions is a one-phase flow. Thus within this code, we developed the conservation equations for one-phase flow. Hydraulic resistance and heat transfer at supercritical pressure are two important aspects to be considered in the modeling of a fuel channel in a nuclear reactor. To choose the accurate correlation to predict the pressure friction factor, we compared numerical calculations, using different correlations found in literature, to experimental data. We concluded that the Garimella (2008) correlation is the most consistent, to be incorporated in the ARTHUR_SCWR code. We proved that the choice of the friction factor correlation affects slightly the distribution of thermal-hydraulic properties in the fuel channel. Under supercritical conditions, water thermal-physical properties are characterized by significant variations in the pseudo-critical region. This behavior influences the forced convection heat transfer phenomena. To choose the adequate correlation to calculate the forced convection heat transfer coefficient, we compared numerical results to experimental data, and we found that the standard deviation given by Mokry et al. (2010) correlation is the lowest. In order to model the fuel channel, some geometrical simplifications are made. In fact, we assumed that the coolant flow in the fuel channel is represented by the flow around the fuel rod, bounded by the first crown. This simplified model was used for neutronic/thermal-hydraulic coupled calculation performed with neutronic codes DRAGON/DONJON (Varin et al., 2005), to analyse the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the fuel channel in CANDU-SCWR.