Implementation of a second-order upwind method in a semi-implicit two-phase flow code on unstructured meshes

Abstract

A two-phase flow analysis code, CUPID, has been developed for a realistic simulation of thermal-hydraulic phenomena in nuclear reactor components. In the CUPID code, a two-fluid three-field model is adopted and the governing equations are solved on unstructured meshes. To obtain the numerical solution, the semi-implicit method of the RELAP5 code was used with some modifications for a cell-centered finite volume method. In this work, a second-order upwind method was implemented for the convective terms of the CUPID code. To get the slopes of the convective quantities, we adopted the Frink's reconstruction method (1994, AIAA Paper 94-0061) and modified it for an application to arbitrary polyhedral cells. To stabilize the numerical solutions, the Barth and Jesperson's slope limiter was used. In order to evaluate the enhanced accuracy and ensure the robustness of the implemented scheme, numerical tests were performed using conceptual single- and two-phase flow problems, which include a strong phase change and very heterogeneous phase distributions. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.