Pointwise Enables Accurate CFD for Nuclear Reactor Rod Bundles

Accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results are needed for the design of nuclear reactor rod bundle cooling, which requires a high-quality, detailed mesh of the complex bundle and wrapped wire geometry to capture the physics appropriately.

Michael Böttcher of KIT used multiple Pointwise structured and unstructured meshing techniques to model the complex geometry of the rods and the wrapped wires that resulted in a highly accurate CFD solution with ANSYS CFX. 

Leveraging Pointwise meshing techniques enabled accurate CFD results for nuclear reactor rod bundles at stringent convergence levels, which cannot be achieved with automatic "free" meshing alone.