Pebble dynamics and thermal-fluid analysis of high-temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactors using DEM and CFD simulations

This study presents a multiphysics computational simulation framework for analyzing pebble dynamics and thermal-fluid behavior in High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Pebble Bed Reactors (HTG-PBR). The pebble circulation and intermixing effects are predicted using Discrete Element Method (DEM) implemented in LIGGGHTS, while the thermal-fluid behavior is simulated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in OpenFOAM. The CFD model employs a porous-media formulation with a local thermal non-equilibrium mode