Development and Validation of Thermal-Hydraulic ... in BWR's and PWR's: Can modern CFD models reliably predict DNB for nuclear power applications?

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The United Kingdom government has decided that continued use of nuclear power should be made to contribute to a low-carbon electricity generating system in the United Kingdom. It is important that new nuclear plants are designed to be as safe as possible, and this research will contribute to this.Broadly, when a water-cooled nuclear reactor remains cooled by water, it is essentially impossible for it to overheat and suffer damage. Conversely, when the water coolant turns inadvertently to steam this possibility does arise. This project is aimed at developing better predictive tools to understand when the change of coolant from liquid water to steam occurs. Better predictive capability here will allow new plants to be designed with even more confidence as to their safety.This project will be undertaken in collaboration with our colleagues in the Indian civil nuclear power industry, specifically at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai. Here our Indian colleagues, supported by the United Kingdom team, will engage in complex measurements of the boiling process, and of the turning of the liquid water coolant into steam. Alongside these measurements, we and they will develop sophisticated computational predictive tools for this change from liquid water to steam. These predictive tools will study the fundamental physics of the boiling process, right down at a scale of a few microns, and will extend to the construction and validation of predictive tools applied to the scale of whole portions of the nuclear core.The quality and effectiveness of the predictive tools to be developed will be able to be assessed by comparing their predictions with the observed occurrence of this water-steam transition.