Comparative Study of Commercial CFD Software Performance for Prediction of Reactor Internal Flow

Even if some CFD software developers and its users think that a state-of-the-art CFD software can be used to reasonably solve at least single-phase nuclear reactor safety problems, there remain limitations and uncertainties in the calculation result. From a regulatory perspective, the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS) is presently conducting the performance assessment of commercial CFD software for nuclear reactor safety problems. In this study, to examine the prediction performance of commercial CFD software with the porous model in the analysis of the scale-down APR (Advanced Power Reactor Plus) internal flow, a simulation was conducted with the on-board numerical models in ANSYS CFX R.14 and FLUENT R.14. It was concluded that depending on the CFD software, the internal flow distribution of the scale-down APR was locally somewhat different. Although there was a limitation in estimating the prediction performance of the commercial CFD software owing to the limited amount of measured data, CFX R.14 showed more reasonable prediction results in comparison with FLUENT R.14. Meanwhile, owing to the difference in discretization methodology, FLUENT R.14 required more computational memory than CFX R.14 for the same grid system. Therefore, the CFD software suitable to the available computational resource should be selected for massively parallel computations.