Thermal-hydraulics verification of a coarse-mesh OpenFOAM-based solver for a Sodium Fast Reactor

Recently, in the Institute Swiss Paul Scherrer Institut, is has developed a platform Multiphysics, based in OpenFOAM, that is capable of performing an analysis multidimensional of a reactor nuclear. One of the main objectives of this project is to verify the part of the code responsible for the Thermo-hydraulic analysis of the reactor. To carry out simulations this part of the code uses the approximation of thick mesh based on the equations of a porous medium. Therefore, the other objective is demonstrate that this method is applicable to the analysis of a reactor nuclear fast of sodium, focusing is in his capacity of predict the transfer of heat between a subset and the space vacuum between subsets of the core of the reactor. (Author)