An Anisotropic Porous Model for Heat Exchanger Modeling of Fluoride-Salt-Cooled High-Temperature Advanced Reactor -- FuSTAR

The birthplace of the Chinese nuclear industry, the vast western region offered enough strategic space maneuvers and deep defense, and it is urgent to develop safe and efficient multi-level energy supply systems. In consequence, led by Xi'an Jiaotong University, a new generation of no water cooling reactor technology was put forward: Fluoride-Salt-cooled high-Temperature Advanced Reactor (FuSTAR) system, which is equipped with the Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger (PCHE). To predict global temperature, flow field, and stress estimation of PCHE, a porous media model needs to be established for rapid design and analysis. Given the apparent anisotropic geometry in PCHE, the conventional porous media method is no longer appropriate. Therefore, in this paper, the anisotropic tensor form of permeability was derived based on the Brinkmann equation, and an empirical anisotropic porous media model was constructed based on the existing resistance coefficient correlations. In addition, a three-dimensional CFD was used to verify the results. The results showed that the anisotropy porous model can simulate the apparent velocity and flow pressure drop characteristics of the whole field well, and the anisotropy is realized by assigning permeability tensor in each zone, which lays a foundation for the subsequent heat transfer coupling design. The methodology presented in this paper may also be applied to the modeling and design of porous media in other complex heat exchangers.