LAUSR

Abstract In France, Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) have recently received a renewed interest. In 2006, the decision was taken by the French Government to initiate research in order to build a first Generation IV prototype (called ASTRID) by 2020. The improvement in the safety of SFR is one of the key points in their conception. Accidental sequences may lead to a significant increase of reactivity. This is for instance the case when the sodium coolant is boiling within the fissile zone. As a consequence, incipient boiling superheat of sodium is an important parameter, as it can influence boiling process which may appear during some postulated accidents as the unexpected loss of flow (ULOF). The problem is that despite the reduction in core power, when boiling conditions are reached, the flow decreases progressively and vapour expands into the heating zone. A crucial investigating way is to optimize the design of the fissile assemblies of the core in order to lead to stable boiling during a ULOF accident, without voiding of the fissile zone. Moreover, in order to evaluate nuclear plant design and safety, a CFD tool has been developed at EDF in the framework of the nuclear industry. Advanced models dedicated to boiling flows have been implemented and validated against experimental data for ten years now including a wall law for boiling flows, wall transfer for nucleate boiling, turbulence and polydispersion model. This paper aims at evaluating the generalization of these models to SFR. At least two main issues are encountered. Firstly, at low Prandtl numbers such as those of liquid metal, classical approaches derived for unity or close to unity fail to accurately predict the heat transfer. In order to evaluate the wall law implemented in the CFD tool, computations have been compared with KALLA experimental results obtained in the case of a rod heated with a constant heat flux which is concentrically embedded in a pipe liquid metal flow (single-phase flow). Secondly, the incipient boiling superheat of sodium is quite different from that of conventional fluids. As a consequence, the nucleate boiling model has been improved and validated against the Charlety’s experiment where a rod heated with a constant heat flux is concentrically embedded in a pipe sodium flow. For different values of the heat flux, the pressure is measured at different locations as function of the mass flow rate. A reasonable agreement has been reached which is very encouraging for further applications. Finally, preliminary computations have been carried out in an assembly constituted of 19 pins equipped with a wrapped wire where partial experimental results are available. Computations have shown a pressure drop at the end of the heated length due to the sudden increase of the hydraulic diameter. Thus, the pressure can drop below the vapour pressure leading to liquid vaporization. This first result supports the assumption of boiling in the upper subassembly zone which could possibly lead to a sodium boiling stabilization.