An unstructured SMAC algorithm for thermal non-equilibrium two-phase flows

The SMAC (Simplified Marker And Cell) algorithm is extended for an application to thermal non-equilibrium two-phase flows in light water nuclear reactors (LWRs). A two-fluid three-field model is adopted and a multi-dimensional unstructured grid is used for complicated geometries. The phase change and the time derivative terms appearing in the continuity equations are implemented implicitly in the pressure correction step. The energy equations are decoupled from the momentum equations for faster convergence. The verification of the present numerical method was carried out against a set of test problems which includes the single and the two-phase flows. The results are also compared to those of the semi-implicit ICE method, where the energy equations are coupled with the momentum equation for pressure correction.