• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.89-97
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• 2016

In this study, direct code coupling, in which two codes share a single flow field, was conducted using 3-dimensional high resolution thermal hydraulics code, CUPID and 1-dimensional system analysis code, MARS. This approach provide the merit to use versatile capability of MARS for nuclear power plants and 3-dimensional T/H analysis capability of CUPID. Numerical Method to directly couple CUPID and MARS was described in this paper. The straight flow and manometer flow oscillation were calculated to verify conservation of coupled CUPID/MARS code in mass, momentum, and energy. This verification calculations indicates that the CUPID/MARS is coupled appropriately in numerical aspect and the coupled code can be applied to nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics after validation against integral transient experiments.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.95-105
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• 2014

The CUPID code has been developed for a transient, three-dimensional, two-phase flow analysis at a component scale. It has been validated against a wide range of two-phase flow experiments. Especially, to assess its applicability to single- and two-phase flow analyses in the Calandria vessel of a CANDU nuclear reactor, it was validated using the experimental data of the 1/4-scaled facility of a Calandria vessel at the STERN laboratory. In this study, a preliminary thermal-hydraulic analysis of the CANDU reactor moderator tank using the CUPID code is carried out, which is based on the results of the previous studies. The complicated internal structure of the Calandria vessel and the inlet nozzle was modeled in a simplified manner by using a porous media approach. One of the most important factors in the analysis was found to be the modeling of the tank inlet nozzle. A calculation with a simple inlet nozzle modeling resulted in thermal stratification by buoyance, leading to a boiling from the top of the Calandria tank. This is not realistic at all and may occur due to the lack of inlet flow momentum. To improve this, a new nozzle modeling was used, which can preserve both mass flow and momentum flow at the inlet nozzle. This resulted in a realistic temperature distribution in the tank. In conclusion, it was shown that the CUPID code is applicable to thermal-hydraulic analysis of the CANDU reactor moderator tank using the cost-effective porous media approach and that the inlet nozzle modeling is very important for the flow analysis in the tank.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.30-48
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• 2011

A three-dimensional thermal-hydraulic code, CUPID, has been developed for the analysis of transient two-phase flows at component scale. The CUPID code adopts a two-fluid three-field model for two-phase flows. A semi-implicit two-step numerical method was developed to obtain numerical solutions on unstructured grids. This paper presents an overview of the CUPID code development and assessment strategy. The governing equations, physical models, numerical methods and their improvements, and the systematic verification and validation processes are discussed. The code couplings with a system code, MARS, and, a three-dimensional reactor kinetics code, MASTER, are also presented.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.419-426
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• 2012

A transient, three-dimensional, two-phase flow analysis code, CUPID, has been developed in KAERI. In this work, we performed a preliminary analysis using the CUPID code to investigate the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the moderator in the Calandria vessel of a CANDU reactor. At first, we validated the CUPID code using the three experiments that were performed at Stern Laboratories Inc. To avoid the complexity to generate computational mesh around the Calandria tube bundles, a porous media approach was applied for the region. The pressure drop in the porous media zone was modeled by an empirical correlation. The results of the calculations showed that the CUPID code can predict the mixed flow pattern of forced and natural convection inside the Calandria vessel very well. Thereafter, the analysis was extended to a two-phase flow condition. Also, the local maximum temperature in the Calandria vessel was plotted as a function of the injection flow rate, which may be utilized to predict the local subcooling margin.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.40 no.7
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• pp.457-470
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• 2016

Most CFD codes, that mainly adopt the heat partitioning model as the wall boiling model, have shown low accuracies in predicting the two-phase flow parameters of subcooled boiling phenomena under low pressure conditions. In this study, a number of subcooled boiling experiments in vertical channels were analyzed using a thermal-hydraulic component code, CUPID. The prediction of the void fraction distribution using the CUPID code agreed well with experimental data at high-pressure conditions; whereas at low-pressure conditions, the predicted void fraction deviated considerably from measured ones. Sensitivity tests were performed on the submodels for major parameters in the heat partitioning model to find the optimized sets of empirical correlations suitable for low-pressure subcooled flow boiling. The effect of the K-factor on the void fraction distribution was also evaluated.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.71-77
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• 2016

The CUPID code is a transient, three-dimensional, two-fluid, thermal-hydraulic code designed for a component-scale analysis of nuclear reactor components. The primary objective of this study is to assess the applicability of CUPID to single-phase turbulent flow analyses of $2{\times}2$ rod bundle subchannel. The bulk velocity at the inlet varies from 1.0 m/s up to 2.0 m/s which is equivalent to the fully turbulent flow with the range of Re=12,500 to 25,000. Adiabatic single-phase flow is assumed. The velocity profile at the exit region is quantitatively compared with both experimental measurement and commercial CFD tool. Three different boundary conditions are simulated and quantitatively compared each other. The calculation results of CUPID code shows a good agreement with the experimental data. It is concluded that the CUPID code has capability to reproduce the turbulent flow behavior for the $2{\times}2$ rod bundle geometry.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.53-60
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• 2013

The boron transport model has been implemented into the CUPID code to simulate the boron transport phenomena of the PWR. The boron concentration conservation was confirmed through a simulation of a conceptual boron transport problem in which water with a constant inlet boron concentration injected into an inlet of the 2-dimensional vertical flow tube. The step wise boron transport problem showed that the numerical diffusion of the boron concentration can be reduced by the second order convection scheme. In order to assess the adaptability of the developed boron transport model to the realistic situation, the ROCOM test was simulated by using the CUPID implemented with the boron transportation.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.14-20
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• 2015

Without electirc power to cool down the hot reactor core, passive systems utilizing natural circulation are becoming a big specialty of recent neculear systems after the severe accident in Fukusima. When we consider the natural circulation in a pool, thermal mixing phenomena may start from single phase circulation and can continue to two phase condition. Since the CUPID code, which has been developed for two-phase flow analysis, can deal with the phase transition phenomena, the CUPID would be pertinent to natural convection problems in single- and two-phase conditions. Thus, the CUPID should be validated against single- and two-phase natural circulation phenomena. For the first step of the validation process, this study is focused on the validation of single-phase natural circulation. Moreover, the CUPID code solves the fluid properties by the relationship to pressure and temperature from the steam table considering non-condensable gas effects, so that the effects from variable properties are included. Simple square thermal cavity problems are tested for laminar and turbulent conditions against numerical and experimental data. Throughout the investigation, it is found that the variable properties can affect the flow field in laminar condition, but the effect becomes weak in turbulence condition, and the CUPID code implementing steam table is capable of analyzing single phase natural circualtion phenomena.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.71-79
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• 2014

A parallelization of the bi-conjugate gradient solver for the pressure equation of the CUPID (component unstructured program for interfacial dynamics) code, which was developed for analyzing the components of a pressurized water-cooled reactor, was studied in a symmetric multi-processing system. The parallel performance was investigated for three typical parallel programming models (MPI, OpenMP, Hybrid) by solving incompressible backward-facing step flow at various grid resolutions. It was confirmed that parallel performance was low when problem size was small or the memory requirement for each thread was considerably higher than the cache memory. Furthermore, it was shown that MPI was better than OpenMP regardless of the problem size, and Hybrid was the best when the number of threads was relatively small.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.24-29
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• 2014

In this study, a parallel performance of CUPID-code has been investigated for both Ethernet and Infiniband network system to examine the effect of cache memory and network-speed. Bi-conjugate gradient solver of CUPID-code has been parallelised by using domain decomposition method and message passing interface (MPI). It is shown that the parallel performance of Ethernet-network system is worse than that of Infiniband-network system due to the slow network-speed and a small cache memory. It is also found that the parallel performance of each system deteriorates for a small problem due to the communication overhead, but the performance of Infiniband-network system is better than Ethernet-network system due to a much faster network-speed. For a large problem, the parallel performance depends less on network system.