Verification and Development of a Steady Thermal CFD Model for High Density Staging of Radiological Materials Packages
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Authors
Murphy-Sweet, Matthew
Issue Date
2024
Type
Thesis
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis overviews the work that took place to exercise and verify results of a computational fluid dynamics model with a densely-packed array of staged heat generating packages in a theoretical ventilated room for the purposes of developing an application that estimates the surface temperatures of the packages with configurable loading conditions. A generic staging building was modelled in Solidworks with lights, a ventilation system, and 640 packages containing radiological materials placed on pallets located on four racks. The geometry was then used in Ansys Workbench where fluid and solid regions were assigned and then meshed with four different grid sizes. In Ansys Fluent, these regions were assigned boundary conditions and material properties that replicate a realistic loading condition for the theoretical staging room. Package temperature results from each mesh were compared with one another to determine the number of iterations and grid size necessary to approach the results achieved by the finest grid for 10,000 iterations. The results of the finest grid sizing are used to present the expected flow pattern in the staging building, the distribution of package temperatures, and the location of the packages of interest. From this work, the grid sizing and number of iterations needed for the simulation for the application were found to be 64 million elements run for 7,000 iterations. Package temperatures from the finest grid result indicate that the maximum package surface temperatures do not exceed 43oC which is 6.4oC colder than the maximum allowable surface temperature of the 9975 package.