Analysis of removal of residual decay heat from interim storage facilities by means of the CFD program FLUENT

Within the scope of nuclear licensing procedures of on-site interim storage facilities for dual purpose casks it is necessary, among other things, to provide proof of sufficient removal of the residual decay heat emitted by the casks. The results of the analyses performed for this purpose define e.g. the boundary conditions for further thermal analyses regarding the permissible cask component temperatures or the maximum permissible temperatures of the fuel cladding tubes of the fuel elements stored in the casks. Up to now, for the centralized interim storage facilities in Germany such analyses were performed on the basis of experimental investigations using scaled-down storage geometries [1]. In the engineering phase of the Lingen on-site interim storage facility, proof was furnished for the first time using the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) program FLUENT. The program FLUENT [2] is an internationally recognized and comprehensively verified program for the calculation of flow and heat transport processes. Starting from a brief discussion of modeling and the different boundary conditions of the computation, this contribution presents various results regarding the temperatures of air, cask surfaces and storage facility components, the mass flows through the storage facility and the heat transfer at the cask surface. The interface point to the cask-specific analyses is defined to be the cask surface.