PNNL

Abstract

In the United States, commercial spent nuclear fuel is typically moved from spent fuel pools to outdoor dry storage pads within a transfer cask system that provides radiation shielding to protect personnel and the surrounding environment. The transfer casks are cylindrical steel enclosures with integral gamma and neutron radiation shields. Since the transfer cask system must be passively cooled, decay heat removal from spent nuclear fuel canister is limited by the rate of heat transfer through the cask components, and natural convection from the transfer cask surface. The primary mode of heat transfer within the transfer cask system is conduction, but some cask designs incorporate a liquid neutron shield tank surrounding the transfer cask structural shell. In these systems, accurate prediction of natural convection within the neutron shield tank is an important part of assessing the overall thermal performance of the transfer cask system. The large-scale geometry of the neutron shield tank, which is typically an annulus approximately 2 meters in diameter but only 5-10 cm in thickness, and the relatively small scale velocities (typically less than 5 cm/s) represent a wide range of spatial and temporal scales that contribute to making this a challenging problem for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. Relevant experimental data at these scales are not available in the literature, but some recent modeling studies offer insights into numerical issues and solutions; however, the geometries in these studies, and for the experimental data in the literature at smaller scales, all have large annular gaps that are not prototypic of the transfer cask neutron shield. This paper presents results for a simple 2-D problem that is an effective numerical analog for the neutron shield application. Because it is 2-D, solutions can be obtained relatively quickly allowing a comparison and assessment of sensitivity to model parameter changes. Turbulence models are considered as well as the tradeoff between steady state and transient solutions. Solutions are compared for two commercial CFD codes, FLUENT and STAR-CCM+. The results can be used to provide input to the CFD Best Practices for this application. Following study results for the 2-D test problem, a comparison of simulation results is provided for a high Rayleigh number experiment with large annular gap. Because the geometry of this validation is significantly different from the neutron shield, and due to the critical nature of this application, the argument is made for new experiments at representative scales