Symposium on Advanced Sensors and Modeling Techniques for Nuclear Reactor Safety

Challenges and Opportunities for Multiscale Thermal Hydraulics

Recent advancements in high performance computing (HPC) are opening doors to a new era of engineering analysis. In the early 2000s, the birth of contemporary commercial HPC architectures enabled the development of multi-physics frameworks that in turn enabled split- operator integration of multiple physics or engineering codes. Each of these independent solvers may be carefully constructed to address specific characteristics of the equations describing the particular physical phenomena addressed by that code. Significant work in the past decade has focused on refinement of these Picard integration schemes and investigation of alternative Jacobian free methods. Today, petascale computational resources are enabling a new, orthogonal layer of integration in which high-resolution simulations describing a particular physical phenomenon are used to improve lower resolution engineering models through both calibration and direct data methods. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is working to develop and deploy advanced multi-scale thermal hydraulics simulation capabilities within several programs supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Initial efforts have helped to define opportunities for early applications and challenges associated with development and qualification of these tools.