Development of Advanced Two-Fluid Model for Boiling Two-Phase Flow in Rod Bundles

Two-fluid model can simulate two-phase flow by computational cost less than detailed two-phase flow simulation method such as interface tracking method. Therefore, two-fluid model is useful for thermal hydraulic analysis in large-scale domain such as rod bundles in nuclear reactors. However, two-fluid model include a lot of constitutive equations. Then, applicability of these constitutive equations must be verified by use of experimental results, and the two-fluid model has problems that the results of analyses depend on accuracy of constitutive equations. To solve these problems, we have been developing an advanced two-fluid model. In this model, an interface tracking method is combined with the two-fluid model to predict large interface structure behavior accurately. Interfacial structures larger than a computational cells, such as large droplets and bubbles, are calculated using the interface tracking method. And droplets and bubbles that are smaller than cells are simulated by the two-fluid model. Constitutive equations to evaluate the effects of small bubbles or droplets on two-phase flow are required in the advanced two-fluid model as same as a conventional two-fluid model. However, dependency of small bubbles and droplets on two-phase flow characteristic is relatively small, and the experimental results to verify the equations are not required much. In this study, we modified the advanced two-fluid model to improve the stability of the numerical simulation and reduce the computational time. Moreover, the modified model was incorporated to the 3-dimensional two-fluid model code ACE-3D. In this paper, we describe the outline of this model and the modification performed in this study. Moreover, the numerical results of two-phase flow in various flow conditions.