Study on pressure drop prediction of BWR fuel assembly using CFD analysis

This paper presents the pressure drop prediction of BWR fuel assembly without experiment. To evaluate the core performance, pressure drop of fuel assembly is one of the key design parameters. The shape of fuel assembly is complicated and the spacer has a strong effect on pressure drop. Therefore, to obtain the pressure drop of fuel assembly, the experiments are needed. However, the experiments need a lot of time and money. In the authors' previous study, the friction coefficient and spacer loss coefficient under single phase flow condition were evaluated using CFD analysis and total pressure drop under two phase flow condition were predicted using these coefficients and verified by the data of the tight lattice bundle. The purpose of this study is to predict the pressure drop of BWR fuel assembly without experiments. The predicted pressure drop by the previous study's method was compared with the pressure drop data for full-scale high-burnup 8x8 fuel assembly covering the operating BWR conditions. The following conclusions are obtained; (1)The average and standard deviations of prediction accuracy (calculation/experiment) were 1.046 and 0.023, (2)The prediction accuracy of this method is almost same as that of the current BWR design method.