A Study on Lead-cooled Reactors on Floating Nuclear Power Plants

Sammanfattning

This thesis explored the thermal-hydraulic feasibility of using lead-cooled fast reactors (LFRs) on floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) by examining the combination of Blykalla’s SEALER and Cefront’s hull design. The exploration starts with a literature review of existing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and heat transfer studies. Furthermore, it conducts a thermalhydraulic analysis of the SEALER under forced and natural circulation conditions using traditional methods, such as the Isolated Subchannel Approach, the results of which are compared to COMSOL Multiphysics simulations for validation. Forbye, the impact on heat transfer properties due to oscillatory wave motions using experimental data from Cefront is studied through transient CFD simulations, ending with a statistical sensitivity analysis using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and Sobol’ indices. The findings illustrate that oscillations in gravitational acceleration induce measurable temperature variations, but the amplitude of wave acceleration has a significantly larger effect than the period. The results show that it is possible to use COMSOL Multiphysics to analyse heat transfer in lead-cooled systems and give an insight into the viability of using LFRs on floating nuclear power plants.