An overview of modeling methods for thermal mixing and stratification in large enclosures for reactor safety analysis

Thermal mixing and stratification phenomena play major roles in the safety of reactor systems with large enclosures, such as containment safety in current fleet of LWRs, long-term passive containment cooling in Gen III+ plants including AP-1000 and ESBWR, the cold and hot pool mixing in pool type sodium cooled fast reactor systems (SFR), and reactor cavity cooling system behavior in high temperature gas cooled reactors (HTGR), etc. Depending on the fidelity requirement and computational resources, 0-D steady state models (heat transfer correlations), 0-D lumped parameter based transient models, 1-D physical-based coarse grain models, and 3-D CFD models are available. Current major system analysis codes either have no models or only 0-D models for thermal stratification and mixing, which can only give highly approximate results for simple cases. While 3-D CFD methods can be used to analyze simple configurations, these methods require very fine grid resolution to resolve thin substructures such as jets and wall boundaries. Due to prohibitive computational expenses for long transients in very large volumes, 3-D CFD simulations remain impractical for system analyses. For mixing in stably stratified large enclosures, UC Berkeley developed 1-D models basing on Zuber's hierarchical two-tiered scaling analysis (HTTSA) method where the ambient fluid volume is represented by 1-D transient partial differential equations and substructures such as free or wall jets are modeled with 1-D integral models. This allows very large reductions in computational effort compared to 3-D CFD modeling. This paper will present an overview on important thermal mixing and stratification phenomena in large enclosures for different reactors, major modeling methods and their advantages and limits, potential paths to improve simulation capability and reduce analysis uncertainty in this area for advanced reactor system analysis tools.