DOE OSTI2016
Helical tubes have been used in a number of systems, including the energy and chemical processing industries. Helical-Coil Steam Generators (HCSGs) in particular have special application in systems for which spatial constraints are important. Variants of these designs are notably included in a number of integral-vessel small modular reactor (SMR) designs which are currently in development by multiple companies. These designs typically have the primary side located within the vessel, with the secondary side flowing upward through the helical tubes. One complexity in implementing an HCSG within the reactor pressure vessel is that any potential flow-induced vibration (FIV) can impact reactor safety. In a typical power plant, heat exchanger tube failures caused by FIV can be costly, but generally do not have immediate impact on the core safety due to their relative isolation from the core area. In an integral-vessel design, a tube rupture could eject material from the secondary side into the primary flow, potentially damaging the core itself or other crucial components. Thus a higher degree of confidence in predicting and/or preventing FIV should be attained for implementing the helical tubes in these designs. A significant campaign is currently underway to address the topic of FIV in helical tube arrays. The U.S. Department of Energy, under the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) initiative, has deemed this a 'high-impact problem'. This will include both experimental and computational contributions from a consortium consisting of multiple universities, industry partners, and national laboratories, including Argonne National Laboratory. The primary industrial partner is NuScale, which will see direct benefits from this initiative to the development of their SMR and its component design. The primary focus of this paper is to establish some of the computational efforts that have been made to this stage and the initial benchmarking of computational tools. (authors)
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗