HEAT TRANSFER SIMULATION IN A SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL REPOSITORY USING ANSYS AND OPENFOAM

ACHILLES J; COSTA ANTONELLA; RAONI JONUSAN; CORZO SANTIAGO; PEREIRA CLAUBIA; GODINO DARÍO; DAMIAN RAMAJO

Santos - Sao Paulo

Congreso; INAC 2019 - International Nuclear Atlantic Conference; 2019

ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE ENERGIA NUCLEAR - ABEN

The use of deep geological formations in a nuclear repository to the disposal of nuclear spent fuel and high-level waste is, currently, the most viable option. However, the decay heat of nuclear waste may compromise its safety.Thus, during the design of such repository, it is important to check if the thermal criteria, presented itself as the temperature at the canister surface and the temperature at the bentonite/rock interface is observed. This paper reports the simulation of the heat transfer that occurs after the 20 first years of disposition of two spent fuel types.This work simulates a repository similar to the Swedish KBS-3 concept on ANSYS and OpenFOAM (OF). The results were compared against a benchmark. As there isn?t enough data from the benchmark, for the correct setup of the problem, to do more robust comparisons of the results, a verification of the physical phenomena was performed. The results indicate that even with the limitations on the ANSYS code, the temperature at the canister surface reaches its maximum around the same time with the OF simulations. When compared to the benchmark,the results differ with the increase of the control volume. For future studies the meshing done on the ANSYS code needs to be improved to allow the comparison between the simulations.