Pre/Post Processing for Thermal-Hydraulic Codes using the SALOME Platform

Personal experience tells that over one man-year of efforts are not enough to develop a reasonable input preparation report for a reactor because of the notorious error-prone tedious calculations based on the design drawings. To overcome this problem, any one can imagine that the utilization of a CAD system will be very much helpful. But, some efforts have to be exercised to evaluate the capability of the present day CAD systems for this type of application before their full scope applications. Even if the evaluation is affirmative, some efforts have to be devoted to develop the necessary procedure for the porosity calculation. The first investigation by authors were made with the commercial CAD, Pro/Engineer and the mesh generator Pointwise. Paraview was used as the post processing system. In this paper, open source SALOME platform is utilized as a replacement for the above commercial codes. he platform SALOME is an extensive libraries that include CAD, mesh generator, post processor and many others. The replacement of the commercial codes like Pro/E and Pointwise by SALOME platform in the mesh handling system has been successfully made. This system can estimate the cell and face porosity without any involvement of the expensive commercial codes. The Geometric model for the reactor vessel has been developed and used to evaluate the applicability of the system. The concept of the super mesh with super cell and super face has been re-checked for the utilization of the post processor.