Investigation of V&V process for thermal fatigue issue in a sodium cooled fast reactor – Application of uncertainty quantification scheme in verification and validation with fluid-structure thermal interaction problem in T-junction piping system

Abstract

Thermal fatigue caused by thermal mixing phenomena is one of the most important issues in design and safety assessment of fast breeder reactors. A numerical simulation code MUGTHES consisting of two calculation modules for unsteady thermal-hydraulics analysis and unsteady heat conduction analysis in structure has been developed to predict thermal mixing phenomena and to estimate thermal response of structure under the thermal interaction between fluid and structure fields. Although verification and validation (V&V) of MUGTHES has been required, actual procedure for uncertainty quantification is not fixed yet. In order to specify an actual procedure of V&V, uncertainty quantifications with the grid convergence index (GCI) estimation according to the existing guidelines were conducted in fundamental laminar flow problems for the thermal-hydraulics analysis module, and also uncertainty for the structure heat conduction analysis module and conjugate heat transfer model was quantified in comparison with the theoretical solutions of unsteady heat conduction problems. After the verification, MUGTHES was validated for a practical fluid-structure thermal interaction problem in T-junction piping system compared with measured results of velocity and temperatures of fluid and structure. Through the numerical simulations in the verification and validation, uncertainty of the code was successfully estimated and applicability of the code to the thermal fatigue issue was confirmed.