Abstract—Accurate prediction of temperature profile of the fuel rod in a nuclear reactor is very important due to safety factors. Temperature at the center and at the surface is critical for designing a nuclear fuel rod. The cladding of the fuel rod is done to incresase the physical strength of the Fuel Rod. The temperature distribution in steady state operation in the nuclear reactor is determined by thermal balance between heat generated and heat transferred to the coolant. This paper attempts a numerical solution to the heat transfer problem of a cylindrical nuclear fuel rod with cladding having uniform generation throughout the fuel body, and heat transfer taking place through convection and radiation at the lateral surface of the cladding material. Solutions proposed through various computational methods i.e. Finite Difference Method (FDM), Finite Volume Method (FVM) and Finite Element Method (FEM) . These results have been plotted and a comparative analysis has been considered to arrive at a desired exactness of the solution. The calculated values from each of the methods are compared and analyzed; appropriate reasons for the deviation of the computed result from the exact solution have been explained.
Index Terms—FDM, FVM, FEM, radiation, cladding.
The authors are with the S‟O‟A University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, ITER, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India (e-mail: nitish.ug2@gmail.com, prats18117@hotmail.com, vinit.agrawal.142@gmail.com, sneha.banerjee89@gmail.com, enitishaparmar@gmail.com, reema1228@gmail.com).
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Cite: N. Anand, P. Acharya , V. Agrawal , S. Banerjee, N. Parmar, and R. Kothari, "Adaptive Numerical and Computational Methods for Temperature Profiling of a Cylindrical Nuclear Fuel Rod," International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 315-319, 2014.
