CFD-Neutronic Coupled Calculation of a Quarter of a Simplified PWR Fuel Assembly Using ANSYS CFX 12.1 and PARCS

Abstract

CSAP (Coupled Solver ANSYS CFX/PARCS), a new computational code system based on coupling the 3D neutron diffusion code PARCS v2.7 and the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) commercial code Ansys CFX 12.1 has been developed as a tool for detailed nuclear reactor core calculations. This paper presents the methodology to couple the CFD code with the neutronic code and also results of steady state and transient calculations of a quarter of PWR fuel assembly. The same calculations have been performed with RELAP5/PARCS coupled code in order to compare the results obtained with ANSYS CFX/PARCS and to assess the consistency and correctness of the calculation procedure.