Investigation on coupling methods for heat transfer field between a reactor core and heat pipes

Abstract

Heat pipe reactors are inherently safe, compact, and capable of providing a reliable energy supply for remote areas. Heat pipe reactors are often designed as solid-state reactors, enabling the analysis of the reactor through the integration of multiple coupled physical fields. This paper proposes a numerical method that uses the equivalent convective coefficient to solve the coupled heat transfer problem between the reactor core and heat pipes under steady-state conditions. This method effectively reduces the number of iterations and accounts for the uneven heat absorption effects of the heat pipes at the corner and side channels on the azimuthal direction. In this study, an open-source code Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE for short) is used to implement the numerical method. The findings will support the coupling analysis procedure of a heat pipe reactor core and heat pipes.