BWR Full Fuel Assembly Testing and Validation

Technical Report · Thu Jul 27 04:00:00 EDT 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1408730· OSTI ID:1408730

Yoon, Su-Jong ^[1]; Baglietto, Emilio ^[2]; Agostinelli, Giulia ^[2]

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1. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
2. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)

This report describes the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) work conducted for completion of the Thermal Hydraulics Methods (THM) Level 3 milestone THM.CLS.P15.10: BWR Full Fuel Assembly Testing and Validation. The extension of existing boiling closure designed for Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) to the high void fraction condition of Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) is one of the challenges for Multiphase Computational Fluid Dynamics (M-CFD) applications. In the efforts aimed at developing the advanced boiling closure for BWRs, the baseline closure model, so-called ‘Zero’ closure, has been developed based on the GEN-I closure for PWRs which was used as a starting point. Since this simplest closure model is robust but does not contain any explicit description of the complex high void fraction mechanisms, the applicability of M-CFD needs to be evaluated before developing advanced closures for BWRs. To support this need, the high fidelity M-CFD simulation with Zero closure has been conducted for the BWR full fuel assembly. The capabilities of M-CFD with Zero closure were evaluated against the international OECD/NRC BFBT benchmark data. The scalability of the M-CFD application to the nuclear fuel assembly was demonstrated with the INL High Performance Computing (HPC) system. This report presents the recent view of the best practices on M-CFD for BWRs to provide a useful reference to identify and overcome common challenges in the M-CFD applications.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1408730
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT--17-42714
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
BFBT benchmark
BWR
baseline zero closure
multi-phase computational fluid dynamics
validation