Session: OAC-04-01 Storage and Transportation of Radioactive and other Hazardous Materials - 1

Paper Number: 105935

105935 - Developing a Cfd Model to Predict Radiological Materials Packaging Temperatures Within a Generic Staging Building 

The objective of this work is to perform computational fluid dynamics simulations of a ventilated radiological-material-package staging building to determine the effect of including or excluding a variety of physical effects and computational methods on both the predicted package temperatures and required computational resources. The generic building contains 640 drum packages, each containing heat-generating radiological material, supported on four racks that are eight levels tall, a forced ventilation system, lighting, and insulated walls. Computational models were constructed that included or excluded (a) shelving, (b) effects of unsteadiness, and (c) radiation heat transfer. Simulations with each drum modeled separately were compared to simpler simulations with sets of four drums represented by an equivalent box-package. These models employed between 10⁶ to 10⁷ elements.

Steady state simulations predicted package temperatures that were within 0.1°C of simulations that included transient effects and required only one-eighth the computational resources. Calculations that excluded shelving predicted temperatures within 0.6°C of simulations that included shelving and required one-fourth the computational resources. Excluding radiation heat transfer systematically increased temperatures by around 1.5°C but reduced computational resources by a factor of four. The box-package model reduced the computational resources by a factor of 3, but systematically predicted higher temperatures by around 1.1°C. These results will be used to develop an efficient computational fluid dynamics model to assess the ability of different staging building designs to prevent the temperature of package components from exceeding specified limits.

Presenting Author: Mustafa HADJ-NACER University of Nevada, Reno

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Mustafa Hadj-Nacer is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR). He joined UNR in 2013 as a post-doctoral research associate. He was then promoted to research scientist in 2014, In 2017, he became a research assistant professor and then promoted to a research associate professor in 2022. Dr. Hadj-Nacer's research is focused on applying and developing experimentally benchmarked computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for Nuclear Packaging and transport.

Authors:

Mustafa HADJ-NACER University of Nevada, Reno
Matthew Murphy-Sweet University of Nevada Reno
Frank Pulciano University of Nevada Reno
Miles Greiner University of Nevada Reno