Conjugate Heat Transfer Coupling of NekRS and MOOSE

These tutorials describe how to couple NekRS to MOOSE through boundary heat transfer by exchanging boundary conditions for wall temperature and heat flux. This is shown schematically in Figure 1. These types of calculations are referred to as conjugate heat transfer.

Figure 1: Illustration of data transfers to couple NekRS to MOOSE for boundary heat transfer in a pin bundle.

Cardinal uses a general formulation that allows NekRS to couple via conjugate heat transfer to any MOOSE application that can compute a heat flux. This is shown schematically in Figure 2. All tutorials in this section couple NekRS to the MOOSE heat transfer module, but the concepts extend equally to coupling NekRS to any of these other MOOSE thermal-fluid codes.

Figure 2: NekRS integrates with any MOOSE application that can compute a heat flux

Five examples are provided:

• Laminar Flow over a heated pebble

• Reflector Bypass Flow around a reflector block in a pebble bed reactor

• Pin Bundle Flow in a bare 7-pin geometry

• Turbulent RANS Channel Flow in a heated Tri-Structural Isotropic (TRISO) compact

• Turbulent LES Flow in a heated 67-pebble HTGR