Development and Application of Single-Phase CFD Methodology for Estimating Flow Field in Rod Bundles

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation has been increasingly used in Nuclear Reactor Safety (NRS) analysis to describe safety–relevant phenomena occurring in the reactor coolant system in greater detail. In this paper, the work about single-phase CFD simulation of rod bundles conducted in Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research & Design Institute (SNERDI) is introduced. A single-phase methodology based on commercial software STAR-CCM+ is developed to simulate the flow field and temperature distribution in fuel rod bundles. Solid model is simply introduced at first. Mesh types, including tetrahedral, polyhedral and trimmer, are compared in order to select the most best one with both good accuracy and less cost. Several turbulence models available in STAR-CCM+, including standard k-epsilon model, realizable k-epsilon model (RKE), shear stress transport k-omega model (SST k-omega), and Reynolds stress model (RSM) are investigated. Trimmed mesh and RKE turbulence model with two-layer all y+ model are finally employed for following calculations. Vortex structures downstream of mixing vanes is qualitatively compared with Particle Image Velocity (PIV) results, and good agreement is achieved. The present method will be further refined in order to play significant role in future optimal design of fuel assembly (FA) grid.