Two broken control rods and a large number of rods with cracks were found at the inspection carried out during the refueling outage of the twin reactors Oskarshamn 3 and Forsmark 3 in the fall of 2008. As a part of an extensive damage investigation, time dependent CFD simulations of the flow and the heat transfer in the annular region formed by the guide tube and control rod stem were carried out, [1]. The simulations together with metallurgical and structural analyses indicated that the cracks were initiated by thermal fatigue. The knowledge assembled at this stage was sufficient to permit the restart of both reactors at the end of year 2008 conditioned to that further studies to be carried out for clarifying all remaining matters. Additionally, all control rods were inserted 14% to protect the welding region of the stem. Unfortunately, this measure led to new cracks a few months later. This matter will be explained in the second part of this work, [2]. As a part of the accomplished complementary work, new CFD models were developed in conformity with the guidelines of references [3] and [4]. The new results establish the simulation requirements needed to accomplish accurate conjugate heat transfer predictions. Those requirements are much more rigorous than the ones needed for flow simulations without heat transfer. In the present case, URANS simulations, which are less resource consuming than LES simulations, seem to rather accurately describe the mixing process occurring inside the control rod guide tube. Structure mechanics analyses based on the CFD simulations show that the cracks are initiated by thermal fatigue and that their propagation and growth are probably enhanced by mechanical vibrations.
A thermal mixing analysis of the Downcomer, Main Recirculation Pumps (MRPs) and Lower plenum of Forsmark’s Unit 3 has been carried out with three separate CFD models. Several difficulties with the boundary conditions have been encountered, particularly with the MRP model. The results obtained predict stable temperature differences of around 8 K at the core inlet. Such large temperature differences have never been observed at Forsmark NPP. Temperature measurements at four positions above the Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) bottom give the mean value used as the core inlet temperature for core analyses with codes such as POLCA. The temperature transmitters used are rather slow and inaccurate. Still, they should be able to detect large stable temperature differences such as those predicted by the aforementioned computations. Indirect indication of the incongruity of these predictions is the possibility of fuel damage caused by such large temperature differences. Fuel damage other than the one caused by debris fretting (thread-like particles) through mechanical influence has not been reported at Forsmark NPP since the implementation of liner cladding in fuel design. Also, the aforementioned difficulties with the connection of the models throw some doubt upon the accuracy of these predictions. A completely connected model of the same RPV volume covered by the separate models predicts temperature differences at core inlet that are almost a fourth of those mentioned above, i. e. approximately 2.5 K. Most of the mixing occur downstream of the MRP diffusers, at the Lower Plenum “inlet”. The reason for this prediction divergence is an impossibility of a correct transfer of complete three-dimensional flow field properties by means of boundary conditions defined at a two-dimensional inlet section.
The linear hydrodynamic stability problem for plane Poiseuille flow of a dilute suspension of rigid fibres is solved numerically. The constitutive equation given by Batchelor (1970a, b, 1971) is used to model the rheological properties of the suspension. The resulting eigenvalue problem is shown to be singular. The appropriate contour in the complex plane is determined by considering an initial-value problem. It is shown that, for a fixed, but not too large, inclination of the wave front to the mean flow, the fibres cause the critical Reynolds number to increase monotonically with the product of the volume fraction of the fibres and the square of their aspect ratio. The stabilizing influence of the fibres seems to vanish for large wave inclination angles.
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