Numerical simulation method using a Cartesian grid for oxidation of core materials under steam-starved conditions

Yamashita, Susumu; Sato, Takumi; Nagae, Yuji; Kurata, Masaki; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 60(9), p.1029 - 1045, 2023/09

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2022.2162996

Development of numerical simulation method of natural convection around heated porous medium by using JUPITER

Uesawa, Shinichiro; Yamashita, Susumu; Shibata, Mitsuhiko; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Proceedings of 30th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE30) (Internet), 9 Pages, 2023/05

For contaminated water management in decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Stations, reduction in water injection, intermittent injection water and air cooling are considered. However, since there are uncertainties of fuel debris in the PCV, it is necessary to examine and evaluate optimal cooling methods according to the distribution state of the fuel debris and the progress of the fuel debris retrieval work in advance. We have developed a method for estimating the thermal behavior in the air cooling, including the influence of the position, heat generation and the porosity of fuel debris. Since a large-scale thermal-hydraulics analysis of natural convection is necessary for the method, JUPITER developed independently by JAEA is used. It is however difficult to perform the large-scale thermal-hydraulics analysis with JUPITER by modeling the internal structure of the debris which may consist of a porous medium. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the heat transfer of the porous medium by adding porous models to JUPITER. In this study, we report the validation of JUPITER applied the porous model and discuss which heat transfer models are most effective in porous models such as series, parallel and geometric mean models. To obtain validation data of JUPITER for the natural convective heat transfer analysis around the porous medium, we performed the heat transfer and the flow visualization experiments of the natural convection in the experimental system including the porous medium. In the comparison between the experiment and the numerical analysis with each model, the numerical result with the geometric mean model was the closest of the models to the experimental results. However, the numerical results of the temperature and the velocity were overestimated for those experimental results. In particular, the temperature near the interface between the porous medium and air was more overestimated.

Benchmark simulation code for the thermal-hydraulics design tool of the accelerator-driven system; Validation and benchmark simulation of flow behavior around the beam window

Yamashita, Susumu; Kondo, Nao; Sugawara, Takanori; Monji, Hideaki*; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 22 Pages, 2023/00

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2023.2268676

To confirm the validity of the thermal-hydraulics design tool based on the Ansys Fluent, we used a detailed computational fluid dynamics code named JAEA Utility Program for Interdisciplinary Thermal-hydraulics Engineering and Research (JUPITER) for the thermal-hydraulics around the beam window (BW) of the Accelerator-Driven System (ADS). The Fluent uses the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model and can quickly calculate the turbulent flow around the BW as a BW design tool. At first, we compared the results of JUPITER with the experimental results using a mock-up BW system in water to confirm the validity of JUPITER. As a result, we confirmed that numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental results. Thus, we showed that JUPITER could be used as a benchmark code. We also performed a benchmark simulation for the Fluent calculation using validated JUPITER to show the applicability of JUPITER as an alternative of experiments. As a result, the mean values around the BW agreed with each other, e.g., the mean velocity profile for stream and horizontal directions. Therefore, we confirmed that JUPITER showed a good performance in validating the thermal-hydraulics design tool as a fluid dynamics solver. Moreover, Fluent has enough accuracy as a thermal-hydraulics design tool for the ADS.

A Numerical simulation method to evaluate heat transfer of fuel debris in air cooling by JUPITER, 1; Project overview and the applicability to the actual reactor system

Yamashita, Susumu; Uesawa, Shinichiro; Ono, Ayako; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Proceedings of 12th Japan-Korea Symposium on Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics and Safety (NTHAS12) (Internet), 8 Pages, 2022/10

no abstracts in English

Prediction of critical heat flux for the forced convective boiling based on the mechanism

Ono, Ayako; Sakashita, Hiroto*; Yamashita, Susumu; Suzuki, Takayuki*; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Proceedings of 12th Japan-Korea Symposium on Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics and Safety (NTHAS12) (Internet), 7 Pages, 2022/10

The new prediction method of critical heat flux (CHF) of the fuel assemblies based on the mechanism is proposed in this study. The prediction method of CHF based on the mechanism has been needed for a long time to enhance the safety analysis and reduce the design cost. From several experimental findings of the liquid-vapor behavior near the heating surface from the nucleate boiling to the CHF, the authors consider that the macrolayer dryout model will be appropriate to predict the CHF under the reactor condition. The prediction method of the macrolayer thickness and the passage period of vapor mass in the fuel assemblies are needed to predict CHF from the macrolayer dryout model. In this study, the CHF under the forced convection is evaluated by combining the prediction methods for the macrolayer thickness and passage period of vapor mass, which are proposed by authors. The prediction of the CHF under the forced convection is examined and compared with the experimental data.

Development of the simplified boiling model applied to the large-scale detailed simulation

Ono, Ayako; Yamashita, Susumu; Sakashita, Hiroto*; Suzuki, Takayuki*; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Proceedings of 13th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics, Operation and Safety (NUTHOS-13) (Internet), 12 Pages, 2022/09

Japan Atomic Energy Agency is developing the computational fluid dynamics code, JUPITER, based on the volume of fluid (VOF) method to analyze detailed thermal-hydraulics in a reactor. The detailed numerical simulation of boiling from a heating surface needs a substantial computational cost to resolve the microscale thermal-hydraulic phenomena such as the bubble generation from a cavity and evaporation of a micro-layer. This study developed the simplified boiling model from the heating surface to reduce the computational cost, which will apply to the detailed simulation code based on the surface tracking method such as JUPITER. We applied the simplified boiling model to JUPITER, and compared the simulation results with the experimental data of the vertical heating surface in the forced convection. We confirmed the degree of their reproducibility, and the issues to be modified were extracted.

Optimization of phase field variables in gas-liquid two-phase flow problems

Sugihara, Kenta; Onodera, Naoyuki; Idomura, Yasuhiro; Yamashita, Susumu

Keisan Kogaku Koenkai Rombunshu (CD-ROM), 27, 5 Pages, 2022/06

The phase-field method has been successfully applied to various multi-phase flow problems as an interface tracking method for gas-liquid interfaces. However, the accuracy of the phase-field method depends on hyper-parameters, which are empirically adjusted for each problem. The phase-field method sustains sharp interfaces by the balance between the numerical viscosity of the advection term and the interface modification by the diffusion and anti-diffusion terms. Based on this fact, we propose a method for deriving the optimal hyper-parameters in a non-empirical manner by performing a basic error analysis of the interface advection.

Iterative methods with mixed-precision preconditioning for ill-conditioned linear systems in multiphase CFD simulations

Ina, Takuya*; Idomura, Yasuhiro; Imamura, Toshiyuki*; Yamashita, Susumu; Onodera, Naoyuki

Proceedings of 12th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Systems ScalA21) (Internet), 8 Pages, 2021/11

https://doi.org/10.1109/ScalA54577.2021.00006

A new mixed-precision preconditioner based on the iterative refinement (IR) method is developed for preconditioned conjugate gradient (P-CG) and multigrid preconditioned conjugate gradient (MGCG) solvers in a multi-phase thermal-hydraulic CFD code JUPITER. In the IR preconditioner, all data is stored in FP16 to reduce memory access, while all computation is performed in FP32. The hybrid FP16/32 implementation keeps the similar convergence property as FP32, while the computational performance is close to FP16. The developed solvers are optimized on Fugaku (A64FX), and applied to ill-conditioned matrices in JUPITER. The P-CG and MGCG solvers with the new IR preconditioner show excellent strong scaling up to 8,000 nodes, and at 8,000 nodes, they are respectively accelerated up to 4.86 and 2.39 from the conventional ones on Oakforest-PACS (KNL).

GPU acceleration of multigrid preconditioned conjugate gradient solver on block-structured Cartesian grid

Onodera, Naoyuki; Idomura, Yasuhiro; Hasegawa, Yuta; Yamashita, Susumu; Shimokawabe, Takashi*; Aoki, Takayuki*

Proceedings of International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region (HPC Asia 2021) (Internet), p.120 - 128, 2021/01

https://doi.org/10.1145/3432261.3432273

We develop a multigrid preconditioned conjugate gradient (MG-CG) solver for the pressure Poisson equation in a two-phase flow CFD code JUPITER. The MG preconditioner is constructed based on the geometric MG method with a three-stage V-cycle, and a RB-SOR smoother and its variant with cache-reuse optimization (CR-SOR) are applied at each stage. The numerical experiments are conducted for two-phase flows in a fuel bundle of a nuclear reactor. The MG-CG solvers with the RB-SOR and CR-SOR smoothers reduce the number of iterations to less than 15% and 9% of the original preconditioned CG method, leading to 3.1- and 5.9-times speedups, respectively. The obtained performance indicates that the MG-CG solver designed for the block-structured grid is highly efficient and enables large-scale simulations of two-phase flows on GPU based supercomputers.

Development and validation of the eutectic reaction model in JUPITER code

Chai, P.; Yamashita, Susumu; Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Annals of Nuclear Energy, 145, p.107606_1 - 107606_13, 2020/09

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2020.107606

The eutectic reaction model in JUPITER code was validated against two series of experimental tests that performed by JAEA. An experiment that aimed to evaluate the eutectic reaction between Zircaloy and Stainless steel, was simulated by JUPITER code to validate its reliability on predicting the binary eutectic reaction phenomenon. A comparison of the simulation and experimental results demonstrates good agreement on the increase rate of the solution depth at various temperature environments. Another series of tests which aimed to predict the eutectic reaction between the control rod blade and channel box in BWR, were simulated by JUPITER code to test its applicability on predicting the eutectic reaction between multiple mixture components. Although the deviation could not be completely eliminated, the reaction performance in the experiment was reasonably reproduced. As a result, it could be concluded that JUPITER code is feasible to predict the eutectic reaction behavior in nuclear severe accident.