CFD validation in OECD/NEA t-junction benchmark.

When streams of rapidly moving flow merge in a T-junction, the potential arises for large oscillations at the scale of the diameter, D, with a period scaling as O(D/U), where U is the characteristic flow velocity. If the streams are of different temperatures, the oscillations result in experimental fluctuations (thermal striping) at the pipe wall in the outlet branch that can accelerate thermal-mechanical fatigue and ultimately cause pipe failure. The importance of this phenomenon has prompted the nuclear energy modeling and simulation community to establish a benchmark to test the ability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes to predict thermal striping. The benchmark is based on thermal and velocity data measured in an experiment designed specifically for this purpose. Thermal striping is intrinsically unsteady and hence not accessible to steady state simulation approaches such as steady state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models.1 Consequently, one must consider either unsteady RANS or large eddy simulation (LES). This report compares the results for three LES codes: Nek5000, developed at Argonne National Laboratory (USA), and Cabaret and Conv3D, developed at the Moscow Institute of Nuclear Energy Safety at (IBRAE) in Russia. Nek5000 is based on the spectral element method (SEM), which is a high-order weighted more » residual technique that combines the geometric flexibility of the finite element method (FEM) with the tensor-product efficiencies of spectral methods. Cabaret is a 'compact accurately boundary-adjusting high-resolution technique' for fluid dynamics simulation. The method is second-order accurate on nonuniform grids in space and time, and has a small dispersion error and computational stencil defined within one space-time cell. The scheme is equipped with a conservative nonlinear correction procedure based on the maximum principle. CONV3D is based on the immersed boundary method and is validated on a wide set of the experimental and benchmark data. The numerical scheme has a very small scheme diffusion and is the second and the first order accurate in space and time, correspondingly. We compare and contrast simulation results for three computational fluid dynamics codes CABARET, Conv3D, and Nek5000 for the T-junction thermal striping problem that was the focus of a recent OECD/NEA blind benchmark. The corresponding codes utilize finite-difference implicit large eddy simulation (ILES), finite-volume LES on fully staggered grids, and an LES spectral element method (SEM), respectively. The simulations results are in a good agreement with experimenatl data. We present results from a study of sensitivity to computational mesh and time integration interval, and discuss the next steps in the simulation of this problem. « less