CFD analysis of flow blockage in the ALFRED FA

In the context of GEN-IV heavy liquid metal-cooled reactors safety studies, the flow blockage in a fuel sub-assembly is considered one of the main issues to be addressed and one of the most important and realistic accident for Lead Fast Reactors (LFR) fuel assembly. The blockage in a fast reactor Fuel Assembly (FA) may have serious effects on the safety of the plant leading to the FA damaging or melting. The external or internal blockage of the FA may impair the correct cooling of the fuel pins, be the root cause of anomalous heating of the cladding and of the wrapper and potentially impact also fuel pins not directly located above or around the blocked area. In order to model the temperature and velocity field inside a wrapped FA under unblocked and blocked conditions, detailed CFD thermal hydraulic analyses of the FA are required. ALFRED is a 300 MWth Lead-cooled fast reactor GEN.IV concept. The advanced conceptual design of the reactor was carried out within the LEADER EU project in the last years. In the SESAME EU project specific thermal-hydraulic experiments and simulations were addressed to explore the basic phenomenology of some accidental events like internal flow blockage. A CFD computational model of the ALFRED FA is built for thermal hydraulic analysis of relevant internal blockage scenarios. The whole model of the ALFRED Fuel Assembly is first presented and calculation of flow and temperature field in nominal condition is carried out. RANS simulations of idealized blockage scenarios like one sector and two-sectors blockage are performed adopting three different spacer grid location (under the active length, at half active length, above the active length). Results showed that the most likely blockage in the lower grid positioned before the active region do not perturb the temperature distribution in the fuel assembly, while the central grid ones have strong consequences and leads to a clad temperature peak behind the blockage with possible clad failure. On the other hand, the most severe case on the upper grid (2 sectors blockage) showed a manageable temperature maximum (700°C) at the end of the active region due to the lower mass flow rate in the FA. As a conclusion lower and upper grid blockages perturb only marginally the temperature field and do not lead to serious clad failure involving only creep long-term effects, while a blockage in the active region leads to serious clad damage and possible clad deformation and fusion.