Averaging methods of the gap heat transfer coefficients and the loss form coefficients of nuclear reactor cores loaded with different fuel bundles

When performing transient analysis in heterogeneous nuclear reactors loaded with different types of fuel bundles is necessary to model the reactor core by a few representative fuel elements with average properties of a region containing a large number of fuel elements. The properties of these representative fuel bundles are obtained by averaging the thermal–hydraulic properties of the fuel elements contained in each region. In this paper we study the different ways to perform the averaging of the thermal–hydraulic properties that can have an influence on the transient results for licence purposes. Also we study the influence of the different averaging methods on the peak clad temperature (PCT) evolution for a LOCA, and on the critical power ratio (CPR) in the hot channels for a turbine trip transient without bypass credit.