TY - GEN
T1 - Modeling the effect of spacer grid and mixing vanes in coupled CFD simulations of small modular reactors
AU - Fang, Jun
AU - Shaver, Dillon
AU - Merzari, Elia
N1 - Funding Information:
This material was based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, as part of the ECP program, under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. The authors gratefully acknowledge use of the computing resources provided by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC) and the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) at Argonne National Laboratory.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Complex flow structure interaction and heat transfer process take place in the nuclear reactor cores. Given the extreme pressure/temperature and radioactive conditions in the core, numerical simulations offer an attractive (and sometimes more feasible) approach to study the related flow and heat transfer phenomena compared to experiments. Meanwhile, the rapid development and deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) facilities are helping unlock the even greater potential of massively parallel numerical simulations. Under the Exascale Computing Project, this study aims to develop suitable momentum sources that can reproduce the effects of spacer grid and mixing vanes (SGMV) on the core coolant flow. The ultimate project goal is to simulate the full core of a small modular reactor (SMR) with coupled thermal-hydraulics and neutronics. Modeling the SGMV effect without body-fitted computational grid avoids the excessive costs in resolving the local geometric details, and supports all the simulation to be scaled up to larger domain sizes. Thus, it is a crucial steppingstone to achieve the full core simulation on upcoming exascale supercomputers. This paper presents the preliminary results on the momentum source modeling as well as the roadmap for future research.
AB - Complex flow structure interaction and heat transfer process take place in the nuclear reactor cores. Given the extreme pressure/temperature and radioactive conditions in the core, numerical simulations offer an attractive (and sometimes more feasible) approach to study the related flow and heat transfer phenomena compared to experiments. Meanwhile, the rapid development and deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) facilities are helping unlock the even greater potential of massively parallel numerical simulations. Under the Exascale Computing Project, this study aims to develop suitable momentum sources that can reproduce the effects of spacer grid and mixing vanes (SGMV) on the core coolant flow. The ultimate project goal is to simulate the full core of a small modular reactor (SMR) with coupled thermal-hydraulics and neutronics. Modeling the SGMV effect without body-fitted computational grid avoids the excessive costs in resolving the local geometric details, and supports all the simulation to be scaled up to larger domain sizes. Thus, it is a crucial steppingstone to achieve the full core simulation on upcoming exascale supercomputers. This paper presents the preliminary results on the momentum source modeling as well as the roadmap for future research.
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U2 - 10.1115/FEDSM2020-20370
DO - 10.1115/FEDSM2020-20370
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85094913342
T3 - American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Fluids Engineering Division (Publication) FEDSM
BT - Computational Fluid Dynamics; Micro and Nano Fluid Dynamics
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
T2 - ASME 2020 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting, FEDSM 2020, collocated with the ASME 2020 Heat Transfer Summer Conference and the ASME 2020 18th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels
Y2 - 13 July 2020 through 15 July 2020
ER -