Parametric study on thermal hydraulics characteristics of a particle bed reactor for nuclear thermal propulsion

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) is regarded as a promising technology and selected as the leading candidate for the human exploration to Mars, as suggested in Design Reference Architecture 5.0 (DRA 5.0). For a long time, many novel NTP systems have been proposed, designed and tested, among which Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) is the most famous one. In the NERVA program, enormous technologies were developed and some records were accomplished. Based on these achievements, a more excellent, compact and lightweight design, i.e., particle bed reactor (PBR) was proposed in the 1980s. In this paper, the thermal hydraulics characteristics of a proposed PBR are investigated. By assuming the characteristics are indifferent along circumference, a two-dimensional steady-state analysis concerning the turbulent flows in PBR is performed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool. In addition, some further work investigates the effect of various aspects including flow direction, mass flow rate and the height of nuclear reactor core on the internal flow and heat transfer processes within the reactor core. These findings may provide technical support for the subsequent design of PBR.