Computational Fluid Dynamics Developments And Applications In Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics

Recent applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to heat and fluid flow in the electric power generation industry are presented, with various turbulence models (including heat transfer) ranging from Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations (RANS) with Eddy Viscosity or Second Moment Closures, to Direct and Large Eddy Simulation (DNS, LES). These simulations are clearly demonstrating the renewed importance of turbulence closure models and the need to combine allthose approaches depending on the applications since the finer models require a priori estimates of the turbulence characteristics, if only to define the strategy for mesh generation. In order to address full scale industrial problems, recent developments are taking every advantage of very high performance computing facilities available. The Code_Saturne software coupled with SYRTHES for conjugated heat transfer proved to be very well suited to this kind of architecture. They are available as freesoftware under GNU GPL.