Processes And Procedures For Application Of Cfd To Nuclear Reactor Safety Analysis

Traditionally, nuclear reactor safety analysis has been performed using systems analysis codes such as RELAP5, which was developed at the INL. However, goals established by the Generation IV program, especially the desire to increase efficiency, has lead to an increase in operating temperatures for the reactors. This increase pushes reactor materials to operate towards their upper temperature limits relative to structural integrity. Because there will be some finite variation of the power density in the reactor core, there will be a potential for local hot spots to occur in the reactor vessel. Hence, it has become apparent that detailed analysis will be required to ensure that local 'hot spots' do not exceed safety limits. It is generally accepted that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes are intrinsically capable of simulating fluid dynamics and heat transport locally because they are based on 'first principles.' Indeed, CFD analysis has reached a fairly mature level of development, including the commercial level. However, CFD experts are aware that even though commercial codes are capable of simulating local fluid and thermal physics, great care must be taken in their application to avoid errors caused by such things as inappropriate grid meshing, low-order discretization schemes, lack of iterative convergence and inaccurate time-stepping. Just as important is the choice of a turbulence model for turbulent flow simulation. Turbulence models model the effects of turbulent transport of mass, momentum and energy, but are not necessarily applicable for wide ranges of flow types. Therefore, there is a well-recognized need to establish practices and procedures for the proper application of CFD to simulate flow physics accurately and establish the level of uncertainty of such computations. The present document represents contributions of CFD experts on what the basic practices, procedures and guidelines should be to aid CFD analysts to obtain accurate estimates of the flow and energy transport as applied to nuclear reactor safety. However, it is expected that these practices and procedures will require updating from time to time as research and development affect them or replace them with better procedures. The practices and procedures are categorized into five groups. These are:1. Code Verification2. Code and Calculation Documentation3. Reduction of Numerical Error4. Quantification of Numerical Uncertainty (Calculation Verification)5. Calculation Validation. These five categories have been identified from procedures currently required of CFD simulations such as those required for publication of a paper in the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering and from the literature such as Roache [1998]. Code verification refers to the demonstration that the equations of fluid and energy transport have been correctly coded in the CFD code. Code and calculation documentation simply means that the equations and their discretizations, etc., and boundary and initial conditions used to pose the fluid flow problem are fully described in available documentation. Reduction of numerical error refers to practices and procedures to lower numerical errors to negligible or very low levels as is reasonably possible (such as avoiding use of first-order discretizations). The quantification of numerical uncertainty is also known as calculation verification. This means that estimates are made of numerical error to allow the characterization of the numerical.