CFD analysis of transverse flow in a wire-wrapped hexagonal seven-pin bundle

•Transverse flow in a wire-wrapped hexagonal seven-pin bundle are simulated.•Four kinds of subchannels are taken as the object.•Effects of wire number and position on transverse velocities are studied.•Parameter studies reveal P/D and H/D have a great influence than Re.•Present transverse velocity correlations need to be modified. Transverse flow induced by helical spacer wires has important effects on the flow and heat transfer behavior of reactor core. In this paper, transverse flow in a wire-wrapped hexagonal seven-pin bundle was simulated by the open source code, OpenFOAM, based on computational fluid dynamic (CFD) method. The Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω model and Spalding wall function were used to resolve the momentum field. Hexahedral dominated meshes were generated to achieve high grid quality. Periodic boundary condition and parallel processing were adopted to save the computational cost. Transverse velocity distributions in four different kinds of subchannel gaps were analyzed. The results show that the influence of wire number and position on the transverse velocity distribution is obvious. For an interior gap, transverse flow seems to be dominated by wires near the gap, and its direction changes periodically in one helical pitch. However, for a peripheral gap, transverse velocity is affected by more wires and its direction is decided by the direction of wire rotation. Parameter studies reveal that the Reynolds number (Re, at the range of 6000–100,000) has little effect on the normalized transverse flow, while the pitch to pin diameter ratio (P/D, at the range of 1.11–1.22) and the helical pitch to pin diameter ratio (H/D, at the range of 12–24) have a great influence on it, especially the P/D. Large discrepancies between our simulation results and some existing correlations were observed. This indicates that new correlations comprehensively considering both P/D and H/D effects need to be developed in future.