Parallelization of TWOPORFLOW, a Cartesian Grid based Two-phase Porous Media Code for Transient Thermo-hydraulic Simulations

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology (INR), Germany, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, Geb. 521 , 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen

^* Corresponding Author, Email: Nico Trost, nico.trost@kit.edu

Abstract

TWOPORFLOW is a thermo-hydraulic code based on a porous media approach to simulate single- and two-phase flow including boiling. It is under development at the Institute for Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology (INR) at KIT. The code features a 3D transient solution of the mass, momentum and energy conservation equations for two inter-penetrating fluids with a semi-implicit continuous Eulerian type solver. The application domain of TWOPORFLOW includes the flow in standard porous media and in structured porous media such as micro-channels and cores of nuclear power plants. In the latter case, the fluid domain is coupled to a fuel rod model, describing the heat flow inside the solid structure. In this work, detailed profiling tools have been utilized to determine the optimization potential of TWOPORFLOW. As a result, bottle-necks were identified and reduced in the most feasible way, leading for instance to an optimization of the water-steam property computation. Furthermore, an OpenMP implementation addressing the routines in charge of inter-phase momentum-, energy- and mass-coupling delivered good performance together with a high scalability on shared memory architectures. In contrast to that, the approach for distributed memory systems was to solve sub-problems resulting by the decomposition of the initial Cartesian geometry. Thread communication for the sub-problem boundary updates was accomplished by the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard.