Development of Local Heat Transfer Models for Safety Assessment of High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Cores—Part I: Pebble Bed Reactors

This and the subsequent paper present models developed for determining fuel particle and fuel element temperatures in normal operation and transient conditions in high temperature reactor cores. Multiscale modeling concepts are used to develop the models for both pebble bed and prismatic core types. This paper, Part I, presents the development of the model for pebble bed reactors. Comparison is made with finite element simulations of an idealized “two-dimensional” pebble in transient conditions, and with a steady-state analytical solution in a spherical pebble geometry. A method is presented for determining the fuel temperatures in the individual batches of a multibatch recycle refuelling regime. Implementation of the multiscale and multibatch fuel models in a whole-core computational fluid dynamics model is discussed together with the future intentions of the research program.