An Implementation of Interfacial Transport Equation into the CUPID code

A component scale thermal hydraulic analysis code, CUPID (Component Unstructured Program for Interfacial Dynamics), is being developed for the analysis of components for a nuclear reactor, such as reactor vessel, steam generator, containment, etc. It adopted a three-dimensional, transient, two phase and three-field model. In order to develop the numerical schemes for the three-field model, various numerical schemes have been examined including the SMAS, semi-implicit ICE, SIMPLE. The governing equations for a 2-phase flow are composed of mass, momentum, and energy conservation equations for each phase. These equation sets are closed by the interfacial transfer rate of mass, momentum, and energy. The interfacial transfer of mass, momentum, and energy occurs through the interfacial area, and this area plays an important role in the transfer rate. The flow regime based correlations are used for calculating the interracial area in the traditional style 2-phase flow model. This is dependent upon the flow regime and is limited to the fully developed 2-phase flow region. Its application to the multi-dimensional 2-phase flow has some limitation because it adopts the measured results of 2-phase flow in the 1-dimensional tube. The interfacial area concentration transport equation had been suggested in order to calculate the interfacial area without the interfacial area correlations. The source terms to close the interfacial area transport equation should be further developed for a wide ranger usage of it. In this study, the one group interfacial area concentration transport equation has been implemented into the CUPID code. This interfacial area concentration transport equation can be used instead of the interfacial area concentration correlations for the bubbly flow region