Numerical simulation on LMR molten-core centralized sloshing benchmark experiment using multi-phase smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics is one of the most widely used mesh-free numerical method for thermo-fluid dynamics. Due to its Lagrangian nature and simplicity, it is recently gaining popularity in simulating complex physics with large deformations. In this study, the 3D single/two-phase numerical simulations are performed on the Liquid Metal Reactor (LMR) centralized sloshing benchmark experiment using the SPH parallelized using a GPU. In order to capture multi-phase flows with a large density ratio more effectively, the original SPH density and continuity equations are re-formulated in terms of the normalized-density. Based upon this approach, maximum sloshing height and arrival time in various experimental cases are calculated by using both single-phase and multi-phase SPH framework and the results are compared with the benchmark results. Overall, the results of SPH simulations show excellent agreement with all the benchmark experiments both in qualitative and quantitative manners. According to the sensitivity study of the particle-size, the prediction accuracy is gradually increasing with decreasing the particle-size leading to a higher resolution. In addition, it is found that the multi-phase SPH model considering both liquid and air provides a better prediction on the experimental results and the reality.