Initial Wire-Wrapped Angle Optimization Analysis of a Liquid Lead-Bismuth Cooled Fuel Assembly Based on OpenFOAM

Abstract The helical wire spacer of liquid lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor (LFR) fuel assembly plays a significant role in the strengthening of the flow and heat transfer. However, most LFRs have a fixed initial angle of wire-wrapped direction in rod bundles, and the optimization analysis of their angle in the subchannel is absent. More analysis of the impacts that the wire spacer has on the liquid lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) coolant should be obtained. In this paper, three different turbulence viscosity models and two constant turbulent Prandtl numbers were applied in the open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) platform OpenFOAM. The numerical results, which were considered with an extensive mesh sensitivity study, were validated against a series of experiment data. The simulations about key thermal hydraulic parameters such as temperature, velocity distribution, pressure drop, local and average Nusselt number were carried out based on 7-pin wire-wrapped rod bundles whose wires winding from internal, edge and corner channel. The results show that the k-ε model with Prt = 2.0 can be used to predict the flow and heat transfer characteristics of LBE. The influence of wire-wrapped starting position indicates that an optimum point exists in the internal channel. This work is useful in future safety design of fuel assemblies in the LFR.