Engineering Model of the Kinetics of the Steel Oxide Layer in a Flow of a Heavy Liquid Metal Coolant Under Various Oxygen Conditions

An engineering model is presented for a self-consistent calculation of the growth of an oxide film in circulation loops with a heavy liquid metal coolant and concentrations of impurities using STAR-CCM+ software complex. The modeling of thermohydraulic and physicochemical processes is based on solving the associated three-dimensional equations of hydrodynamics, heat transfer, convective-diffusive transport, and the formation of chemically interacting impurity components in the coolant volume, and on the surface of steels. The parabolic constant, which is determined by the degree of steel oxygen consumption, obviously significantly depends on this steel grade. For a more adequate justification of the evolution of the oxide film, a semi-empirical model is proposed for using the empirical parameterization of the parabolic constant not only in the equation for changing the thickness of the oxide film but also in the mass balance equation associated with it.