Development of temporal and spatial high‐order schemes for two‐fluid seven‐equation two‐pressure model and its applications in two‐phase flow benchmark problems

Current existing main nuclear thermal‐hydraulics (T‐H) system analysis codes, such as RALAP5, TRACE, and CATHARE, play a crucial role in the nuclear engineering field for the design and safety analysis of nuclear reactor systems. However, two‐fluid model used in these T‐H system analysis codes is ill posed, easily leading to numerical oscillations, and the classical first‐order methods for temporal and special discretization are widely employed for numerical simulations, yielding excessive numerical diffusion. Two‐fluid seven‐equation two‐pressure model is of particular interest due to the inherent well‐posed advantage. Moreover, high‐order accuracy schemes have also attracted great attention to overcome the challenge of serious numerical diffusion induced by low‐order time and space schemes for accurately simulating nuclear T‐H problems. In this paper, the semi‐implicit solution algorithm with high‐order accuracy in space and time is developed for this well‐posed two‐fluid model and the robustness and accuracy are verified and assessed against several important two‐phase flow benchmark tests in the nuclear engineering T‐H field, which include two linear advection problems, the oscillation problem of the liquid column, the Ransom water faucet problem, the reversed water faucet problem, and the two‐phase shock tube problem. The following conclusions are achieved. (1) The proposed semi‐implicit solution algorithm is robust in solving two‐phase flows, even for fast transients and discontinuous solutions. (2) High‐order schemes in both time and space could prevent excessive numerical diffusion effectively and the numerical simulation results are more accurate than those of first‐order time and space schemes, which demonstrates the advantage of using high‐order schemes.