A New Design for SCWR Fuel Assemblies

A new type of fuel assemblies (FAs) was designed for super critical water reactors (SCWRs). A square FA is composed by 16 rectangular channels. Each channel has 26 fuel rods that are arranged into two rows and enclosed by thermal walls. The gap between each channel acts as water rods as usual design does. Flat absorbers are used as the control rods. They are placed in the gaps. Then computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to evaluate the design. The results show mixing vanes can lower the peak cladding temperature of fuel rods. The thermal wall between cold water rods and subchannels should be optimized to produce reasonable heat transfer.Copyright © 2013 by ASME