Investigation of coarse-grid CFD approach for nuclear engineering application

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, an innovative coarse grid CFD approach is developed that aims toexploit the capabilities of sub-channel codes and CFD methods while overcoming theirlimitations. In the approach, a very coarse mesh is implemented in the CFD softwareOpenFOAM and a new wall treatment, based on the traditional concept of the wallfunction, is applied to the wall boundary conditions of the domain to take into accountthe low resolution of the grid which does not allow to effectively capture the effect of thesolid walls on the thermo-hydraulics of the flow. To investigate the performance of thenew approach, the method is implemented first in three simple test cases for whichthe sub-channel codes are the state-of-the-art thermo-hydraulic analysis since theyare single-phase flow problems in which there are no prevailing 3D flow conditions.An additional test case representing a 2x2 fuel bundle with three full-length rods andone half-length rod is investigated to verify the behavior of the new approach in caseswhere secondary flows are present. The results for the pressure fields are comparedwith the analytical pressure profiles for the four test cases that well represent the onesthat would be obtained with sub-channel code analysis, while the results for the wallshear stresses obtained in the four test cases are compared with the ones obtained witha more refined mesh in which the traditional wall function approach is implementedsince they should be the best estimation of the actual wall shear stresses at the walldomain. For the first two cases, the developed approach produces reasonable resultswith a good agreement to the analytical pressure profiles while the other two testcases show that the methodology has a limited applicability and, before proceedingwith the extension of the new approach to single-phase problems with 3D prevailingphenomena and two-phase problems, it is necessary to solve the issues that emerge forsome types of cases.