Time evolution simulation of heat removal in a small water tank by natural convection

• Autor(a) principal: Jachic, João
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IEN
• Texto Completo: http://carpedien.ien.gov.br:8080/handle/ien/2377
• topic: INAC 2013; Natural convection; Nuclear simulation

One of the cooling modes for any source of heat such as in a shutdown nuclear core is the natural convection. The design specifications of any cooling pool can only be done when the removal heat rate and the corresponding mass flow rate is reasonably established. In our simulation scheme, we assumed that the body forces acting in the cubic water cell are: the weight, the drag force and the integrated pressure forces on the horizontal surfaces, the viscosity shear forces on the vertical surfaces and also a special viscosity drag force due to the mass dislocation along a Bernoulli type current tube outside the motive region. For a suitable time step, the uprising convection velocity is determined by an implicit and also by an explicit solution algorithm. The resulting differential equation depends on updating specific mass, dynamic viscosity and constant pressure heat coefficient with the last known temperature in the cell that absorbed heat. Numerical calculation software was performed using MATLAB’s technical computing language and then applied for a heat generation plate simulating a spent fuel assembler from a shutdown nuclear core. The results show time evolution of convection, terminal velocity and water temperature distribution. Pool dimension as well as pool level decrement are also determined for various air exhausting system conditions and heat rate of the spent fuel plate being cooled.