The recent rapid development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology provides a powerful tool to obtain accurate temperature distribution of prismatic fuel blocks. In general, however, a CFD analysis requires tremendous computational efforts to analyze whole prismatic fuel blocks due to complex geometry and near wall treatment to resolve the boundary layer of the fluid flow. Such efforts might be a huge burden for a designer who wants a large number of calculations with various design options. Recently, a practical method to analyze a thermal behavior of prismatic fuel blocks has been developed by the present authors to overcome the demerits of CFD and system code calculations. The developed method solves three-dimensional heat conduction in prismatic fuel blocks like a CFD code. For the fluid, however, the present method adopts one-dimensional conservation equations like a system code. Such a combination enables significantly reduced computational effort with reasonable computational accuracy. This paper presents an intensive thermo-fluid analysis for prismatic fuel assemblies using the new method. In order to examine the validity and the accuracy of the developed method, at first, single standard and control fuel assemblies have been analyzed and compared with the CFD results. Then the developed method has been applied to a whole core thermal analysis of a prismatic reactor.
Numerical simulations of 1D inverse heat conduction problems using overdetermined RBF-MLPG method
