Hydraulic Design Optimization of a Reactor Coolant Pump used for Small Modular Reactor

Abstract

The authors have studied hydraulic design of reactor coolant pump used for small modular reactor. Computational fluid dynamics was used to evaluate the impeller design. Seven factors for the 3D shape variables of the Impeller were selected as a design variables. As a result of using the response surface method for optimizing the shape of the impeller, we were able to select four major design factors for efficiency. The four factors were the impeller blade lengths, outlet blade angle component, and rake component. Finally, we obtained an efficient impeller design through the optimization of these four factors. The head increasing was 0.4m and the efficiency was improved by 0.5% compared to the original model.