Turbulence Modelling for Advanced Nuclear Reactor Fuel Assemblies: Current Status and Future Perspectives

The Generation IV International Forum (GIF) has selected six advanced reactors that offer promising technology. Thermal-hydraulics plays an important role in further research and development of these reactor designs. In this regard, experimental studies are considered as the reference; however, at times, they are limited to certain conditions. To that respect, the numerical reference database brings added value and compliments the experimental studies. These reference databases are extremely important and helpful in validating the low-order computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, in particular (Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes) RANS-based models. These low-order RANS models are the workhorse of the industry and play an important role to study the design and safety analyses; particularly, the advanced reactor designs. However, to gain trust in methods, proper validation is needed. To facilitate this, a wide range of attempts has been made in terms of validation against their respective reference databases. The main purpose of this article is to provide the status, in terms of a state-of-the-art review, of these validation exercises for advanced reactor fuel assemblies. In particular, more attention has been given to the benchmarking exercises where more extensive and elaborative validation procedures have been taken into account.