Simultaneous Solution of Helical Coiled Once-Through Steam Generator with High-Speed Water Property Library

Efficient simulation of the helical coiled once-through steam generator (H-OTSG) is crucial in the design and safety analysis of the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR). The physical property and phase transformation of water in the steam generator brings great challenges during simulation. The water properties calculation routine occupies a large part of the computational time in the steam generator solution process. Thus, a thermohydraulic property library is developed based on the IAPWS-IF97 formulation in this work to reduce the computational cost. Here the formulation adopts the backward equation method to avoid iterations in thermodynamic property calculation. Moreover, two Newton-method-based simultaneous solutions are implemented as implicitly nonlinear solvers, including Jacobian-Free Newton–Krylov (JFNK) and Newton–Krylov (NK) methods, due to its excellent computational performance. These simultaneous solution algorithms are combined with the developed water property library to simulate the H-OTSG efficiently. The numerical analysis is performed based on the transient and steady-state cases of the HTR-10 steam generator. Successful simulations of HTR-10 steam generator cases demonstrate the capability of the newly developed method.