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Abstract: The pebble flow is the principal issue for the design of the pebble bed reactor. In order to verify the feasibility of a two-region-designed pebble bed reactor, the experimental installation with a taller vessel has been built, which is proportional to the real pebble bed reactor. With the aid of the experimental installation, the stable establishment and maintenance of the two-region arrangement has been verified, at the same time, the applicability of the DEM program has been also validated. Research results show: (1) The pebble''s bouncing on the free surface is an important factor for the mixing of the different colored pebbles. (2) Through the guide plates installed in the top of the pebble packing, the size of the mixing zone can be reduced from 6–7 times to 3–4 times the pebble diameter. (3) The relationship between the width of the central region and the ratio of loading pebbles is approximately linear in the taller vessel. (4) The heighten part of the pebble packing can improve the uniformity of the flowing in the lower. (5) To increase the base cone angle can decrease the scale of the stagnant zone. All of these conclusions are meaningful to the design of the real pebble reactor. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: By means of the four basic forms of the phenomenological method, experimental results have intuitionally disclosed the physical mechanism from various views of the quasi-static pebble flow in a pebble bed reactor and successfully verified the availability of the discrete element method, on which the parameter effects have been investigated, including different base cone angle and different friction coefficient. The flow fields under different parameters have been discussed. On the basis of these researches, a framework of the general understanding of pebble flow mechanism has been drawn; many essential problems are discussed, including the interpretation of the quasi-static pebble flow, force analysis inside the pebble packing, propagation and distribution of the voids, internal equilibrium arches, competition mechanism, internal collapse, self-organization, equivalent shear force, equivalent normal force, the physical process of stagnant zone''s influence on the overall flow field, and so on. All of these are very helpful to understand the physical mechanism of the quasi-static pebble flow in a pebble bed reactor. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]