01-Jun-2021 | Market Research Store
Earthquakes can cause massive damage to infrastructure, especially nuclear reactors which can cause immeasurable harm. That is why most nuclear plants are fitted with a proactive system which shuts off the functioning of the plant when it detects any form of external danger. Nowadays, reactors are fitted in terms of safety, sustainability, and efficient working. Researchers at the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University have been studying the fourth generation nuclear reactors – pebble-bed reactors. Pebble-bed reactors are a combination of spherical fuel cells(or pebbles) and a fluid coolant (a gas of some kind). There are about 40,000 fuel pebbles at a given type of reactor.
During a similar incident, the gas in the reactor core heats up and cold air from below begins to rise due to natural convection cooling. Moreover, the fuel pebbles are made from pyrolytic carbon and tristructural-isotropic particles which make them resistant to a higher temperature range of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. These high temperature based reactors can be cooled easily with the help of natural convection which makes an incident as the likes of Fukushima to occur almost impossible. During normal operation, pebble-bed reactors often depend on a high-speed flow to cool the pebbles.
This flow creates a movement like effect between the pebbles, similar to the way wind has an effect on the trajectory of a light object. However, the accounting of the total friction lost between the object and the air has to be accounted for. This is the issue that the researchers aimed to solve using a method called as Discrete Element. The flow of the induced motion and friction between the air is calculated and the simulated model is tested against the thermal measurement factors in the SANA experiment. The conclusion of the experiment led to the team finding a Computational Fluid Dynamic-Discreet Element Method model for the flow over a pebble bed.