PSI-BOIL, a building block towards the multi-scale modeling of flow boiling phenomena

Full text of publication follows: In these work we report the current status of the Swiss project Multi-scale Modeling Analysis (MSMA), jointly financed by PSI and Swissnuclear. The project aims at addressing the multi-scale (down to nano-scale) modelling of convective boiling phenomena, and the development of physically-based closure laws for the physical scales appropriate to the problem considered, to be used within Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes. The final goal is to construct a new computational tool, called Parallel Simulator of Boiling phenomena (PSI-BOIL) for the direct simulation of processes all the way down to the small-scales of interest and an improved CFD code for the mechanistic prediction of two-phase flow and heat transfer in the fuel rod bundle of a nuclear reactor. An improved understanding of the physics of boiling will be gained from the theoretical work as well as from novel small- and medium scale experiments targeted to assist the development of closure laws. PSI-BOIL is a computer program designed for efficient simulation of turbulent fluid flow and heat transfer phenomena in simple geometries. Turbulence is simulated directly (DNS) and its efficiency plays a vital role in a successful simulation. Having high performance as one of the main prerequisites, PSIBOIL is tailored in such a way to be as efficient a tool as possible, relying on well-established numerical techniques and sacrificing all the features which are not essential for the success of this project and which might slow down the solution procedure. The governing equations are discretized in space with orthogonal staggered finite volume method. Time discretization is performed with projection method, the most obvious a the most widely used choice for DNS. Systems of linearized equation, stemming from the discretization of governing equations, are solved with the Additive Correction Multigrid (ACM). methods. Two distinguished features of PSI-BOIL are the possibility to handle solid obstacles in the flow and to simulate multiphase flows by explicit surface tracking using the Level Set (LS) approach. Solid blocks are represented as regions on numerical grid where momentum equations are not solved, but energy equation is, thus giving us the possibility to simulate fluid flow and heat transfer in the fluid part of the domain and heat transfer in the solid part (practically the fuel rod cladding) and having the possibility to simulate conjugate heat transfer is essential for simulation of boiling phenomena. In this work, we present the details of the PSI-BOIL program and some first results of free-surface flow simulation. (authors)