Preliminary Design of Compressor Impeller for innovative Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor

Abstract

Recently, S-CO2 Brayton cycle technology is an emerging research area for power conversion system development due to attractive advantages of S-CO2 Brayton cycle; high efficiency and compactness. Thus, various technologies and approaches are applied to component development and analysis or demonstration of the S-CO2 Brayton cycle system. For nuclear power plant application, applying S-CO2 Brayton cycle to Sodium cooled Fast Reactors and Small Modular Reactors are currently considered and active research is being performed by various research institutions and universities. As a part of research activities on the S- CO2 Brayton cycle development for a nuclear power system, KAIST joint research team is currently working on an innovative Sodium cooled Fast Reactor (iSFR) development which utilizes S-CO2 Brayton cycle as its power conversion system. Various research subjects including reactor physics, thermo-hydraulics, material, cycle analysis and system integration are being considered as research issues currently. However, technical issues rising from dramatic change of thermodynamic property of CO2 near the critical point still remain as problems to be solved. Among many issues on S-CO2 component design and analysis, design and analysis methodologies of the main compressor is the most important issue since the main design concern of S-CO2 Brayton cycle is to set operating condition of main compressor to approach the critical point. Thus, KAIST research is currently working on the construction of compressor design and analysis tool for S-CO2 compressor which is called as KAIST_TMD to obtain reliable design and analysis results. As a part of KAIST_TMD construction, 3D impeller geometry generation module was recently generated to connect between 1D mean stream line analysis and 3D CFD analysis.