Current status of thermal/hydraulic feasibility project for reduced-moderation water reactor, 2; Development of two-phase flow simulation code with advanced interface tracking method

Yoshida, Hiroyuki; Tamai, Hidesada; Onuki, Akira; Takase, Kazuyuki; Akimoto, Hajime

Nuclear Engineering and Technology, 38(2), p.119 - 128, 2006/04

The reduced-moderation water reactor core adopts a hexagonal tight-lattice arrangement. In the core, there is no sufficient information about the effects of the gap spacing and grid spacer configuration on the flow characteristics. Thus, we start to develop a predictable technology for thermal-hydraulic performance of the core using an advanced numerical simulation technology. As a part of this technology development, we are developing a two-phase flow simulation code TPFIT with an advanced interface tracking method. The vector and parallelization of the code was conducted to fit the large-scale simulations. The numerical results applied to large-scale water-vapor two-phase flow in tight lattice rod bundles are shown and compared with experimental results. In the results, a tendency of the predicted void fraction distribution in horizontal plane agreed with the measured values including the bridge formation of the liquid at the position of adjacent fuel rods where an interval is the narrowest.