Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2020
18th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
CFD Analysis of a Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger Applied to a Nuclear Fusion Reactor
Submission Author:
Gabriel Caetano Gomes Ribeiro da Silva , RJ
Co-Authors:
Ana Carolina Oliveira, Gabriel Caetano Gomes Ribeiro da Silva, Carolina Palma Naveira Cotta, Su Jian
Presenter: Gabriel Caetano Gomes Ribeiro da Silva
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2020.CIT20-0693
Abstract
Nuclear fusion research has been growing over the past few decades since it is considered an alternative source of sustainable energy. The cooling system of a fusion reactor is complex and requires modern technologies to suit the operation. In this context, the printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) are promising due to their compactness, high temperature resistance and high effectiveness. The objective of this study is the analysis of heat transfer and pressure drop in a PCHE with hot and cold layers of zigzag channels alternated vertically, with semicircular cross sections, under the conditions of the ITER fusion reactor. In both the hot and the cold streams, the considered working fluid was helium at the pressure of 8.0 MPa and at a high Reynolds number range (from 5,000 to 40,000 for the hot fluid and from 20,000 to 55,000 for the cold fluid). There are no studies in the literature considering high Reynolds number helium flows in PCHE zigzag channels, which makes it important to develop numerical correlations for the Nusselt number and the friction factor under these conditions. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the tool used. The analysis is done by calculating the Nusselt number and the Fanning friction factor. Next, numerical correlations are developed for these two parameters over a wide range of turbulent Reynolds numbers.
Keywords
CFD, PCHE, nuclear fusion, Heat transfer, pressure drop, helium
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