Background. Thermophysical modeling software packages are widely used for modeling various thermohydraulic processes including modeling nuclear reactor fuel element. Verification of such calculations is possible only if we compare the results obtained in different packages (cross-verification) due to the extreme complexity or impossibility to carry out analytical calculations or experiments. It seems relevant to carry out cross-verification of calculations of WWER reactor fuel elements in COMSOL Multiphysics software package using another popular ANSYS software package.
Materials and methods. Models of fuel elements for the analysis of thermohydraulic processes are developed using thermophysical modeling packages ANSYS Fluent and COMSOL Multiphysics for cross-verification of calculation results in the latter. Modeling of temperature fields is carried out based on the heat conduction equation with an internal heat source. The authors have considered several formulations of problems: with fuel element cladding and without it and the central hole in the fuel.
Results. Models of fuel elements of the WWER-1000 reactor have been designed for three formulations of problems with different designs in ANSYS Fluent and COMSOL Multiphysics software packages. Temperature fields have been determined using the finite element method. The results of the calculations of the fuel core maximum temperature are presented and compared for two software packages. The maximum relative deviation of the temperatures obtained is 0,97 %.
Conclusions. A comparison of the temperature calculations results obtained using models developed in two packages shows that the relative deviation of the values corresponds to the error of the measuring instruments. It confirms that COMSOL Multiphysics can be successfully used to simulate processes in WWER reactors along with ANSYS Fluent.