A CFD benchmarking exercise based on flow mixing in a T-junction

Abstract The paper describes an international benchmarking exercise, sponsored by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), aimed at testing the ability of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes to predict the important fluid flow parameters affecting high-cycle thermal fatigue induced by turbulent mixing in T-junctions. The results from numerical simulations are compared to measured data from an experiment performed at 1:2 scale by Vattenfall Research and Development, Alvkarleby, Sweden. The test data were released only at the end of the exercise making this a truly blind CFD-validation benchmark. Details of the organizational procedures, the experimental set-up and instrumentation, the different modeling approaches adopted, synthesis of results, and overall conclusions and perspectives are presented.