Date of Graduation
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Advisor/Mentor
Walters, Keith
Committee Member/Reader
Leylek, Jim
Abstract
This paper is a documentation of a submission to the First Annual ASTFE Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Competition [1]. To validate simulations of turbulent mixing in buoyancy-driven flows, an air and argon test case was set up inside the University of Michigan’s MiGaDome mixing vessel. This submission to the competition used a polyhedral mesh of about two and a half hundred thousand cells, a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the MiGaDome, and the Wall-Adapting Local Eddy-viscosity (WALE) subgrid approximation model. The competition included a factor considering the energy cost of our simulations, so it was decided to not refine the grid further, nor to run the simulation any further than the onset of convergence. While the data could not be compared to actual results during testing due to the blind nature of the competition, the simulation results made reasonable physical sense based on the data we recorded, that being the mean velocities, Reynolds normal stresses, and Reynolds shear stresses.
Keywords
MiGaDome, LES, WALE, mean velocity, Reynolds normal stress, Reynolds shear stress, turbulent mixing
Citation
Strauss, K. (2024). LARGE EDDY SIMULATION OF FLUID MIXING IN MIGADOME FACILITY FOR THE ASTFE NUCLEAR THERMAL HYDRAULICS CFD COMPETITION. Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/meeguht/124