• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.636-655
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• 2010

A thermal-hydraulic code, named CUPID, has been being developed for the realistic analysis of transient two-phase flows in nuclear reactor components. The CUPID code development was motivated from very practical needs, including the analyses of a downcomer boiling, a two-phase flow mixing in a pool, and a two-phase flow in a direct vessel injection system. The CUPID code adopts a two-fluid, three-field model for two-phase flows, and the governing equations are solved over unstructured grids with a semi-implicit two-step method. This paper presents an overview of the CUPID code development and assessment strategy. It also presents the code couplings with a system code, MARS, and, a three-dimensional reactor kinetics code, MASTER.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.30-48
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• 2011

A three-dimensional thermal-hydraulic code, CUPID, has been developed for the analysis of transient two-phase flows at component scale. The CUPID code adopts a two-fluid three-field model for two-phase flows. A semi-implicit two-step numerical method was developed to obtain numerical solutions on unstructured grids. This paper presents an overview of the CUPID code development and assessment strategy. The governing equations, physical models, numerical methods and their improvements, and the systematic verification and validation processes are discussed. The code couplings with a system code, MARS, and, a three-dimensional reactor kinetics code, MASTER, are also presented.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.279-296
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• 2010

For the analysis of transient two-phase flows in nuclear reactor components, a three-dimensional thermal hydraulics code, named CUPID, has been developed. The CUPID code adopts a two-fluid, three-field model for two-phase flows, and the governing equations were solved over unstructured grids, which are very useful for the analysis of flows in complicated geometries. To obtain numerical solutions, the semi-implicit numerical method for the REALP5 code was modified for an application to unstructured grids, and it has been further improved for enhanced accuracy and fast running. For the verification of the CUPID code, a set of conceptual problems and experiments were simulated. This paper presents the flow model, the numerical solution method, and the results of the preliminary assessment.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.1487-1503
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• 2019

The methods and performance of a pin-level nuclear reactor core thermal-hydraulics (T/H) code ESCOT employing the drift-flux model are presented. This code aims at providing an accurate yet fast core thermal-hydraulics solution capability to high-fidelity multiphysics core analysis systems targeting massively parallel computing platforms. The four equation drift-flux model is adopted for two-phase calculations, and numerical solutions are obtained by applying the Finite Volume Method (FVM) and the Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equation (SIMPLE)-like algorithm in a staggered grid system. Constitutive models involving turbulent mixing, pressure drop, and vapor generation are employed to simulate key phenomena in subchannel-scale analyses. ESCOT is parallelized by a domain decomposition scheme that involves both radial and axial decomposition to enable highly parallelized execution. The ESCOT solutions are validated through the applications to various experiments which include CNEN $4{\times}4$, Weiss et al. two assemblies, PNNL $2{\times}6$, RPI $2{\times}2$ air-water, and PSBT covering single/two-phase and unheated/heated conditions. The parameters of interest for validation include various flow characteristics such as turbulent mixing, spacer grid pressure drop, cross-flow, reverse flow, buoyancy effect, void drift, and bubble generation. For all the validation tests, ESCOT shows good agreements with measured data in the extent comparable to those of other subchannel-scale codes: COBRA-TF, MATRA and/or CUPID. The execution performance is examined with a mini-sized whole core consisting of 89 fuel assemblies and for an OPR1000 core. It turns out that it is about 1.5 times faster than a subchannel code based on the two-fluid three field model and the axial domain decomposition scheme works as well as the radial one yielding a steady-state solution for the OPR1000 core within 30 s with 104 processors.