Development and verification of the coupled thermal–hydraulic code – TRACE/SCF based on the ICoCo interface and the SALOME platform

Abstract

The system thermal–hydraulic code TRAC/RELAP Advanced Computational Engine (TRACE) and the sub-channel code SubChanFlow (SCF) have been coupled together based on the Interface for Code Coupling (ICoCo) and the SALOME platform. It is a server-client system where TRACE and SCF are computational engines, ICoCo transfers the coupling data, and SALOME supervises the two clients’ synchronization. TRACE and SCF run serially. The coupled code adopts the domain-overlapping (assisted by a Dynamic Implicit Additional Source (DIAS) method) and the Operator Split (OS) explicit coupling approaches. The MEDCoupling library manages the field mapping between different meshes of TRACE and SCF. The YACS module in SALOME provides developers with useful tools that can implement numerical codes in SALOME. It provides users with Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) that can construct and execute the coupling simulations as well. Users can conveniently build/optimize/execute the coupling schemes in SALOME. The coupled code has been verified with an AP1000 feedwater-temperature-drop transient.