CASL VMA Milestone Report FY16 (L3:VMA.VUQ.P13.08): Westinghouse Mixing with STAR-CCM+

Technical Report · Fri Sep 30 04:00:00 EDT 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1431491· OSTI ID:1431491

Gilkey, Lindsay Noelle ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

STAR-CCM+ (STAR) is a high-resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code developed by CD-adapco. STAR includes validated physics models and a full suite of turbulence models including ones from the k-ε and k-ω families. STAR is currently being developed to be able to do two phase flows, but the current focus of the software is single phase flow. STAR can use imported meshes or use the built in meshing software to create computation domains for CFD. Since the solvers generally require a fine mesh for good computational results, the meshes used with STAR tend to number in the millions of cells, with that number growing with simulation and geometry complexity. The time required to model the flow of a full 5x5 Mixing Vane Grid Assembly (5x5MVG) in the current STAR configuration is on the order of hours, and can be very computationally expensive. COBRA-TF (CTF) is a low-resolution subchannel code that can be trained using high fidelity data from STAR. CTF does not have turbulence models and instead uses a turbulent mixing coefficient β. With a properly calibrated β, CTF can be used a low-computational cost alternative to expensive full CFD calculations performed with STAR. During the Hi2Lo work with CTF and STAR, STAR-CCM+ will be used to calibrate β and to provide high-resolution results that can be used in the place of and in addition to experimental results to reduce the uncertainty in the CTF results.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1431491
• Report Number(s): SAND2016--9761R; 647877
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING