CFD prediction of mixing in a steam generator mock-up: Comparison between full geometry and porous medium approaches

• CFD is used to simulate single phase mixing in a model steam generator.
• Motive of the work is to compare porous media approach with full geometry representation of tubes.
• Porous media approach is found to compare favorably with full representation in steady states.

In CFD simulations of single phase flow mixing in a steam generator (SG) during a station blackout severe accident, one is faced with the problem of representing the thousands of SG U-tubes. Typically simplifications are made to render the problem computationally tractable. In particular, one or a number of tubes are lumped in one volume that is treated as a single porous medium which replicates the pressure loss and heat transfer characteristics of the real tube. This approach significantly reduces the computational size of the problem and hence simulation time. In this work, we endeavor to investigate the adequacy of this approach by performing a series of simulations. We first validate the porous medium approach against results of the 1/7th scale Westinghouse SG-S3 test. In a second step, we make two separate simulations of flow in the PSI SG mock-up, i.e. one in which the porous medium model is used for the tube bundle, and another in which the full geometry is represented. In all simulations, the Reynolds Stress (RSM) model of turbulence is used. We show that in steady state conditions, the porous medium treatment yields results which are comparable to those of the full geometry representation (temperature distribution, recirculation ratio, hot plume spread, etc.). Hence, the porous medium approach can be extended with a good degree of confidence to model single phase mixing in the full scale SG.