Editorial: CFD Applications in Nuclear Engineering

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational multiphase fluid dynamics (CMFD) methods have attracted great attentions in predicting single-phase and multiphase flows under steady-state or transient conditions in the field of nuclear reactor engineering. The CFD research circle is rapidly expanding, and the CFD topic has been covered in many international conferences on nuclear engineering, such as ICONE, NURETH, NUTHOS, and CFD4NRS, which greatly extends the forum to exchange information in the application of CFD codes to nuclear reactor safety issues. Currently, more and more scholars are devoting their efforts to CFD study in the nuclear engineering community, and a series of valuable research results have emerged in recent years. Therefore, this research topic was proposed, and the issue was organized by Tian from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Petrov from University of Michigan, Erkan from the University of Tokyo, Liao from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, and Wang from Xi’an Jiaotong University, aiming to share the most advanced progress and innovations related to CFD study in nuclear engineering around the world. In this topic, the CFD simulation in rod bundles is carried out, and the simulation results are validated based on the LDA measurement in a 5 × 5 rod bundle installed with two split-mixing-vane grids (Xiong et al.). The models of internal heating and natural convention buoyancy, as well as the models of WMLES turbulence and phase changing, were applied in the open-source CFD software OpenFOAM to perform numerical simulations of the COPRA single-layer molten pool experiment (Xi et al.). Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations were performed to study the long-term heat removal mechanisms in the General Atomics’Modular High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (MHTGR) design during a P-LOFC accident (Wang et al.). The transient hydraulic characteristics of multistage centrifugal pump during start-up process were also studied using the CFD method (Long et al.). In terms of two-phase flow simulation using the CFD method, the capabilities and advantages provided by a model that includes an elliptic-blending Reynolds stress turbulence closure (EB-RSM), allowing fine resolution of the velocity field in the near-wall region, are tested over a large database (Colombo and Fairweather). Ling et al. (2020) present a numerical simulation of subcooled flow boiling at a high-pressure condition. An interface tracking method, VOSET, was used to handle the moving interface, and conjugate heat transfer between the wall and the fluid was included in the numerical model. A comparison of the CFD simulation results with the high-resolution experimental data from a helical coil experimental setup operated with a mixture of water and air is discussed, with special emphasis on two-phase pressure drops and void fraction distributions (Che et al.). Zeng et al. Edited by: Muhammad Zubair, University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates