Development of a novel two-phase flow solver for nuclear reactor analysis: Validation against sodium boiling experiments

Recent numerical advancements at the Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour (LRS) have led to the development of a novel two-phase porous medium-based thermal-hydraulic simulation tool, integrated in the broader multi-physics framework of the GeN-Foam code. This simulation tool takes advantage of the modern programming paradigm offered by the finite volume-oriented OpenFOAM numerical library. It enables the 3-D investigation of thermal-hydraulic phenomena in nuclear systems via a dispersed Euler-Euler 6-equation formalism for the representation of two-phase flow. Stemming from previous work related to the presentation and verification of the solution algorithms, this paper is focused on the presentation of the modelling capabilities and their validation against different sets of sodium boiling experiments. These experiments were performed under both quasi-steady-state and transient conditions at former experimental facilities at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra and Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe.