A Method to Couple Two-Phase Flow Models

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The problem of the coupling of distinct models has recently become a challenging research topic. The need for the unsteady interfacial coupling of distinct models immediately arises in industrial projects where computational facilities require the use of different models in order to describe parts of a whole concept. For nuclear applications in the framework of nuclear power plants, it represents a challenging area, since many codes have been developped up to now, in order to cope with the system scale (corresponding to the one-dimensional simulation of the whole primary coolant circuit), the component scale (corresponding to the three-dimensional simulation of the flow inside the core, or inside the steam generator, using an homogenized approach), or the classical CFD scale. In order to reach a better understanding or representation of the flow in the nuclear plant, one actually needs to couple these codes. Owing to the great effort in the building of these codes and their validation in the past, a straightforward consequence is that the interfacial coupling should only affect the boundary conditions. This need for the coupling techniques also arises when one wishes to compute the flow in a gas turbine engine (see or http://www.stanford.edu/group/cits/ for instance).