Parametric study of a vortex diode for a nuclear reactor emergency shut-off system.

摘要

A vortex diode is a device with no mechanical parts that exerts high resistance to the flow as it goes into the diode in one direction and yet it exerts minimum resistance to the flow in the opposite direction, making it an attractive candidate to be used in a nuclear reactor emergency shut-off system. The present work is a computational simulation of different vortex diodes using FLUENT, computational fluid dynamics software to perform a parametric analysis of the flow of different size diodes, as well as different cooling fluids. The objectives were to identify characteristics and trends related to the diode's performance. In the study it was determined that for the same design, diodicity is strongly affected by the Reynolds number. Other parameters such as velocity and pressure contours were also obtained from the numerical solutions.