Contribution to numerical methods for all Mach flow regimes and to fluid-porous coupling for the simulation of homogeneous two-phase flows in nuclear reactors

The numerical simulation of steam generators of pressurized water reactors is a complex problem, involving different flow regimes and a wide range of length and time scales. An accidental scenario may be associated with very fast variations of the flow with an important Mach number. In contrast in the nominal regime the flow may be stationary, at low Mach number. Moreover whatever the regime under consideration, the array of U-tubes is modelled by a porous medium in order to avoid taking into account the complex geometry of the steam generator, which entails the issue of the coupling conditions at the interface with the free-fluid. We propose a new pressure-correction scheme for cell-centered finite volumes for solving the compressible Navier-Stokes and Euler equations at all Mach number. The existence of a discrete solution, the consistency of the scheme in the Lax sense and the positivity of the internal energy were proved. Then the scheme was extended to the homogeneous two-phase flow models of the GENEPI code developed at CEA. Lastly a multigrid-AMR algorithm was adapted for using our pressure-correction scheme on adaptive grids. Regarding the second issue addressed in this work, the numerical simulation of a fluid flow over a porous bed involves very different length scales. Macroscopic interface models - such as Ochoa-Tapia-Whitaker or Beavers-Joseph law for a viscous flow - represent the transition region between the free-fluid and the porous region by an interface of discontinuity associated with specific transmission conditions. An extension to the Beavers-Joseph law was proposed for the convective regime. By introducing a jump in the kinetic energy at the interface, we recover an interface condition close to the Beavers-Joseph law but with a non-linear slip coefficient, which depends on the free-fluid velocity at the interface and on the Darcy velocity. The validity of this new transmission condition was assessed with direct numerical simulations at different Reynolds numbers. (author)