Sensitivity Studies of Shear Stress Transport Turbulence Model Parameters on the Prediction of Seven-Rod Bundle Benchmark Experiments

This paper reports the findings of a sensitivity study of parameters in the shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model in a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to predict an experiment from the Generation IV International Forum Supercritical-Water-Cooled Reactor (GIF SCWR) 2013–2014 seven-rod subchannel benchmark exercise. This study was motivated by the result of the benchmark exercise that all the CFD codes gave similar results to a subchannel code, which does not possess any sophisticated turbulence modeling. Initial findings were that the CFD codes generally underpredicted the wall temperatures on the B2 case in the region where the flow was supercritical. Therefore, it was decided to examine the effect of various turbulence model parameters to determine if a CFD code using the SST turbulence model could do a better job overall in predicting the wall temperatures of the benchmark experiments. A sensitivity study of seven parameters was done, and changes to two parameters were found to make an improvement.