Fuel debris' air cooling analysis using a lattice Boltzmann method

Onodera, Naoyuki   ; Idomura, Yasuhiro   ; Kawamura, Takuma ; Uesawa, Shinichiro  ; Yamashita, Susumu   ; Yoshida, Hiroyuki  

A dry method is one of practical methods for decommissioning the TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has been evaluating the air cooling performance by using the JUPITER code. However, the JUPITER code requires a large computational cost to capture debris' structures. To accelerate such CFD analyses, we use the CityLBM code, which is based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and is highly optimized for GPUs. The CityLBM code is validated against free convective heat transfer experiments at JAEA, and the similar accuracy as the JUPITER code is confirmed regarding the prediction capability of heat transfer and the resulting temperature distributions. It is also shown that the elapse time of a CityLBM simulation on GPUs is reduced to 1/6 compared with that of the corresponding JUPITER simulation on CPUs with the same number of GPUs and CPUs. The results show that the LBM is promising for accelerating thermal convective simulations.