Interassembly Flow in Fast Reactors

The interassembly region in fast reactors is the fluid space outside the ducts, but inside the reactor vessel. The following scripts mesh this geometry with various approximations. With all of these scripts, you can control the mesh settings (numbers of elements, boundary layer meshing strategy, etc.) and geometry (vessel diameter, duct thickness, etc.) by directly editing the script parameters.

No Structural Components

To generate a mesh for interassembly flows without any structural components (load pads, restraint rings, etc.) such as in Figure 1, you can use the utils/meshes/interassembly/mesh.py script.

Figure 1: Example mesh which can be generated with the interassembly meshing script

To create the mesh:

cd utils/meshes/interassembly/mesh.py
python mesh.py -g

With Structural Components

To generate a mesh for interassembly flows with two sets of load pads and restraint rings such as in Figure 2, you can use the utils/meshes/interassembly_w_structures/mesh.py script.

Figure 2: Example mesh which can be generated with the interassembly_w_structures meshing script

To create the mesh:

cd utils/meshes/interassembly_w_structures/mesh.py
python mesh.py -g