Fluid flow and heat transfer investigation of pebble bed reactors using mesh-adaptive LES

The very high temperature reactor is one of the designs currently being considered for nuclear power generation. One its variants is the pebble bed reactor in which the coolant passes through complex geometries (pores) at high Reynolds numbers. A computational fluid dynamics model with anisotropic mesh adaptivity is used to investigate coolant flow and heat transfer in such reactors. A novel method for implicitly incorporating solid boundaries based on multi-fluid flow modelling is adopted. The resulting model is able to resolve and simulate flow and heat transfer in randomly packed beds, regardless of the actual geometry, starting off with arbitrarily coarse meshes. The model is initially evaluated using an orderly stacked square channel of channel-height-to-particle diameter ratio of unity for a range of Reynolds numbers. The model is then applied to the face-centred cubical geometry. coolant flow and heat transfer patterns are investigated.