Parametric Analysis of Molten Salt Natural Circulation Loop using Computational Fluid Dynamics
Rahmad Dahana Saputra (a), Sidik Permana (a,b*), Duwi Hariyanto (c), Syeilendra Pramuditya (a,b), Syaiful Bakhri (d)

(a)Nuclear Physics and Biophysics Research Division, Physics Department, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, Bandung Institute of Technology, Jalan Ganesha 10 Bandung 40132, Indonesia
(b)Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, Bandung Institute of Technology, Jalan Ganesha 10 Bandung 40132, Indonesia
(c)Industrial Technology Faculty, Institut Teknologi Sumatera, Jl. Terusan Ryacudu, Lampung, Indonesia
(d)Research Center for Nuclear Material and Radioactive Waste Technology (PRTBNLR), Research Organization for Nuclear Energy, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), South Tangerang 15314, Indonesia

Abstract

Natural circulation is a form of passive safety in nuclear reactor. Natural circulation is important to prevent another accident like fukushima nuclear disaster that happen because the loss of power to the pump. An experiment on irregular pentagon natural circulation loop has done before using water as its coolant. In this study, the water coolant is replaced with molten salt to analyze its flow parameters. ANSYS Fluent which is a finite volume based computational fluid dynamics software is used to simulate the loop. First the loop heater and cooler temperature is varied to see the respons of the Reynolds number (Re), cold leg temperature (t1), and hot leg temperature (t3) for FLiBe, FLiNaK, and FNaB. For all molten salt, the Re is proportional to heater temperature when the cooler temperature is constant. For constant heater temperature condition, Re does not have a particular trends when the cooler temperature increase. t1 and t3 always increase when the heater or cooler temperature increase. FNaBe is added for second analysis that focuses on comparing Re, t1, and t3 for constant heater condition and constant cooler condition. It is observed that FNaB have the highest Re due to its low viscosity. A correlation on the trends of t1 and t3 to the velocity trends is also observed.

Keywords: Natural Circulation, Ansys Fluent, FLiBe, FLiNaK, FNaB, FNaBe

Topic: Innovative Nuclear Energy Systems