Numerical analysis of a small-scale novel vortex tower integrated with heat source for Nuclear Application

To build a new nuclear power plant, it is necessary to take into consideration certain parameters concerning the site selection, among which is the availability of cooling water. The cooling water system is made up of two circuits: a closed primary circuit and a secondary condensation circuit that uses water from the sea or the river. This last circuit consumes a lot of water, some of which evaporates into the atmosphere. To save the wasted water, we realized a prototype of a Small-scale Novel Vortex Tower (SNVT) on a laboratory scale, simulating the cooling water of the secondary circuit. The SNVT is a device that generates an artificial vortex as part of the preliminary design of a Vortex Tower for nuclear power plant applications. During operation, the extracted airflow to the top is heated and cooled by contact with ambient air temperatures at the exit of the vertical section of the chimney. A numerical study using the ANSYS-CFX/ CFD package is used to predict the flow and performance parameters of the realized SNVT. To do this, a realistic domain of the flow model, such as geometry and mesh, is developed and executed. In order to solve the governing equation, the turbulent SST model with buoyancy is used. Alternatively, the influence of inflow air velocity, hot source temperature, and mass flow created is investigated. The air enters the SNVT device at a low velocity of 0.1 m/s, passes through the hot source (the water tank), and enters the vortex producing zone via the air guide vanes installed in this convergence chamber. The calculated findings that the SNVT may generate airflow with a maximum velocity of 4.38 m/s. Therefore, we intended to generate electrical energy using a turbine device while also removing energy from the hot source using artificial vortex production. The results are compared to previous literature research and found to be in good agreement.