Some Specific CASL Requirements for Advanced Multiphase Flow Simulation of Light Water Reactors

Because of the diversity of physical phenomena occuring in boiling, flashing, and bubble collapse, and of the length and time scales of LWR systems, it is imperative that the models have the following features: • Both vapor and liquid phases (and noncondensible phases, if present) must be treated as compressible. • Models must be mathematically and numerically well-posed. • The models methodology must be multi-scale. A fundamental derivation of the multiphase governing equation system, that should be used as a basis for advanced multiphase modeling in LWR coolant systems, is given in the Appendix using the ensemble averaging method. The remainder of this work focuses specifically on the compressible, well-posed, and multi-scale requirements of advanced simulation methods for these LWR coolant systems, because without these are the most fundamental aspects, without which widespread advancement cannot be claimed. Because of the expense of developing multiple special-purpose codes and the inherent inability to couple information from the multiple, separate length- and time-scales, efforts within CASL should be focused toward development of a multi-scale approaches to solve those multiphase flow problems relevant to LWR design and safety analysis. Efforts should be aimed at developing well-designed unified physical/mathematical and high-resolution numerical models for compressible, all-speed multiphase flows spanning: (1) Well-posed general mixture level (true multiphase) models for fast transient situations and safety analysis, (2) DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation)-like models to resolve interface level phenmena like flashing and boiling flows, and critical heat flux determination (necessarily including conjugate heat transfer), and (3) Multi-scale methods to resolve both (1) and (2) automatically, depending upon specified mesh resolution, and to couple different flow models (single-phase, multiphase with several velocities and pressures, multiphase with single velocity and pressure, etc.) A unified, multi-scale approach is advocated to extend the necessary foundations and build the capability to simultaneously solve the fluid dynamic interface problems (interface resolution) as well as multiphase mixtures (homogenization)