Preliminary experimentally-validated forced and mixed convection computational simulations of the Rotatable Buoyancy Tunnel

Although computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has not been directly utilized to perform safety analyses of nuclear reactors in the United States, several vendors are considering adopting commercial numerical packages for current and future projects. To ensure the accuracy of these computational models, it is imperative to validate the assumptions and approximations built into commercial CFD codes against physical data from flows analogous to those in modern nuclear reactors. To this end, researchers at Utah State University (USU) have constructed the Rotatable Buoyancy Tunnel (RoBuT) test facility, which is designed to provide flow and thermal validation data for CFD simulations of forced and mixed convection scenarios. In order to evaluate the ability of current CFD codes to capture the complex physics associated with these types of flows, a computational model of the RoBuT test facility is created using the ANSYS Fluent commercial CFD code. The numerical RoBuT model is analyzed at identical conditions to several experimental trials undertaken at USU. Each experiment is reconstructed numerically and evaluated with the second-order Reynolds stress model (RSM). Two different thermal boundary conditions at the heated surface of the RoBuT test section are investigated: constant temperature (isothermal) and constant surface heat flux (isoflux). Additionally, the fluid velocity at the inlet of the test section is varied in an effort to modify the relative importance of natural convection heat transfer from the heated wall of the RoBuT. Mean velocity, both in the streamwise and transverse directions, as well as components of the Reynolds stress tensor at three points downstream of the RoBuT test section inlet are compared to results obtained from experimental trials. Early computational results obtained from this research initiative are in good agreement with experimental data obtained from the RoBuT facility and both the experimental data and numerical method can be used for future benchmark studies. (author)