Three-Dimensional Calculations of Fluid-Thermal Mixing in a Babcock & Wilcox Plant at Stagnated Loop Flow
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Analysis of a full-scale cold leg and downcomer of a Babcock & Wilcox-designed pressurized water reactor is performed to provide an accurate estimation of the local fluid temperatures when the cold high-pressure safety fluid is injected into the cold leg carrying a hot fluid. Such temperature predictions are needed in resolving the so-called pressurized thermal shock issue in the nuclear industry. An accurate mass-flow-weighted skew-upwind scheme is used to approximate the convective transport terms in the COMMIX-1A code approximation of the fluid energy equation. This new scheme is shown to considerably reduce the false diffusion that plagued multidimensional thermal-hydraulic applications. The computed fluid velocity patterns and temperature predictions have shown similar behavior to the flow visualization and temperature field measurements in scaled experiments.