Structure Design and Optimization of the Mass Flow Distribution Device of Downcomer for Fluoride-Salt-Cooled High-Temperature Advanced Reactor – FuSTAR

The new generation of water-free cooling reactors: the FuSTAR system (Fluoride-Salt-cooled high-Temperature Advanced Reactor), mainly proposed by Xi’an Jiaotong University, is at the design stage. So far, the overall parameters of the heat transport system of FuSTAR have been obtained, and there is a pressing need to design and optimize the mass flow distribution device of Downcomer. In this paper, to obtain the specific parameters of structure matching the design values of mass flow rate, the finite element analysis was adopted, combined with the Nelder-Mead algorithm in the nonlinear programming. The results show that the mass flow distribution device with a multiple-port plate structure can achieve the purpose of the values of mass flow rate. Moreover, the mass flow rate is not so sensitive to the geometric parameters of these structures, which means more engineering margin. Based on this research, the detailed structural parameters and physical information about the distribution device were obtained, and the data from numerical tests can be used to build the proxy models to speed up transient analysis programs of FuSTAR.