Flow mixing and heat transfer deterioration investigation of supercritical carbon dioxide in wire-wrapped bundles

As one selection of the fourth-generation reactors, the gas cooled reactor has received enormous attention such as high power conversion efficiency and simple cycle layout. In this paper, the flow mixing and heat transfer characteristics of supercritical carbon dioxide within a seven-pin wire-wrapped bundle were investigated. Due to the lack of more experiments data of velocity field, two experiments were selected to validate the uncertainty of different turbulence models from the view of temperature field. The analysis of mass exchange between different subchannels revealed that coolant flows consistently in a certain direction in edge and corner subchannels, whereas in center subchannels, the cross flow changes direction periodically. The mixing coefficients at three types of subchannel interfaces were fitted by a sine function with the R2 values are all greater than 0.96. For different mass flux and pressures, the root mean square error between correlations and simulations was less than 1 × 10-3, except when Re equals 15000. Additionally, the heat transfer deterioration of SCO2 was observed. While wire spacers can mitigate the extent of heat transfer deterioration, they cannot completely eliminate it. The Performance Evaluation Criterion (PEC) was introduced to assess the effectiveness of wire spacers in enhancing heat transfer. The results indicate that the PEC exceed unity, meaning that the enhanced heat transfer capability outweighs the additional resistance loss caused by wire spacers. With increasing pressure, the PEC decreases but remains greater than unity. The mixing of coolant between different subchannel induced by wire spacers can reduce the wall temperature of rods at the edge of the bundle. However, the seven-pin wire-wrapped bundle was investigated in this work, and the results may not accurately reflect the flow and heat transfer inside a real reactor rod bundle. In the future, a larger scale rod bundle should be conducted to obtain more universally applicable and realistic flow and heat transfer phenomenon for reactor assembly design.