Behaviour and stability of the two-fluid model for fine-scale simulations of bubbly flow in nuclear reactors

Journal article, 2015

In the present work, we formulate a simplistic two-fluid model for bubbly steam-water flow existing between fuel pins in nuclear fuel assemblies. Numerical simulations are performed in periodic 2D domains of varying sizes. The appearance of a non-uniform volume fraction field in the form of meso-scales is investigated and shown to be varying with the bubble loading and the domain size, as well as with the numerical algorithm employed. These findings highlight the difficulties involved in interpreting the occurrence of instabilities in two-fluid simulations of gas-liquid flows, where physical and unphysical instabilities are prone to be confounded. The results obtained in this work therefore contribute to a rigorous foundation in on-going efforts to derive a consistent meso-scale formulation of the traditional two-fluid model for multiphase flows in nuclear reactors.