Computational analyses in regulatory practice related to the German technical rules and standards

The application of numerical codes is well established in the regulatory practice for nuclear power plants. Therefore, requirements for computer-aided analyses can be found in the nuclear technical rules and standards. These requirements are also applied for CFD analyses, which have increasingly been in the spotlight of research activities and component design in the last years due the significant increase in computational capacity. Hence, the actual status of CFD as a possible design and analysis tool in the supervising process of nuclear power plants will be discussed in this paper. The focus is set on the prerequisites which have to be fulfilled by codes and, in particular, by the user who wants to use CFD methods. The prerequisites will be derived directly from the existing German technical rules and standards. Finally, two examples for typical CFD applications for nuclear safety analyses are given.