The development of high fi delity Steam Generator three dimensional thermal hydraulic coupling code: STAF-CT

The thermal hydraulic performances of Steam Generator (SG) under both steady and transient operation conditions are of great importance for the safety and economy in nuclear power plants. In this paper, based on our self-developed SG thermal hydraulic analysis code STAF (Steam-generator Thermal-hydraulic Analysis code based on Fluent), an improved new version STAF-CT (fully Coupling and Transient) is developed and introduced. Compared with original STAF, the new version code STAF-CT has two main functional improvements including Transient and Fully Three Dimensional Coupling features. In STAF-CT, a three dimensional energy transferring module is established which can achieve energy ex-change computing function at the corresponding position between two sides of SG. The STAF-CT is validated against the international benchmark experiment data and the results show great agreement. Then the U-shaped SG in AP1000 nuclear power plant is modeled and simulated using STAF-CT. The results show that three dimensional flow fields in the primary side make significant effect on the energy source distribution between two sides. The development of code STAF-CT in this paper can provide an effective method for further SG high fidelity research in the nuclear reactor system. (c) 2020 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper introduces the self-developed SG thermal hydraulic analysis code STAF and its improved version STAF-CT, which features transient and fully three-dimensional coupling functions. Through validation and simulation, it is shown that STAF-CT provides an effective method for high-fidelity research on SG in nuclear reactor systems.