Modification of the Core Cooling System of TRIGA 2000 Reactor

To accomplish safety requirements, a set of actions has to be performed following the recommendations of the IAEA safety series 35 applied to research reactor. Such actions are considered in modernization of the old system, improving the core cooling system and safety evaluations. Due to the complexity of the process and the difficulty in putting the apparatus in the reactor core, analytical and experimental study on the determination of flow and temperature distribution in the whole coolant channel are difficult to be done. In the present work, a numerical study of flow and temperature distribution in the coolant channel of TRIGA 2000 has been carried out using CFD package. For this study, simulations were carried out on 3-D tested model. The model consists of the reactor tank, thermal and thermalizing column, reflector, rotary specimen rack, chimney, fuel element, primary pipe, diffuser, beam tube and a part of the core are constructed by 1.50 million unstructured tetrahedral cell elements. The results show that for the initial condition (116 fuel elements in the core) and for the inlet temperature of 24°C and the primary velocity of 5.6 m/s, there no boiling phenomena occur in the coolant channel. Due to this result, it is now possible to improve the core cooling system of TRIGA 2000 reactor. Meanwhile, forced flow from the diffuser system only affected the flow pattern in the outside of chimney and put on a small effect to the fluid flow's velocity in the inside of chimney.