The Thermal-Hydraulic Research Laboratory serves the nuclear industry performing fundamental and applied research on single- and two-phase flow, and multiphase flow phenomena.

The laboratory hosts numerous phenomenological, separate effects, and integral effects test facilities, serving the research community in three main subject areas:

Light Water Reactors
Advanced Reactors
High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors

We are proud to have established partnership and collaboration with national and international Universities, Research Laboratories, and Industry.

The Laboratory

The Thermal-Hydraulic Research Laboratory is located at the University Service Building (USB). With an extension of 14,000 ft², the laboratory includes all required services that are fully available to the projects, including:

Two fully-equipped machine shops, used to fabricate customized components and parts, and to facilities the construction test sections
Source of Cold,
De-Ionized Water System
Compressed Air, Helium and Nitrogen
Low/High Voltage AC/DC Power Supplies

Instrumentation

The state-of-the-art instrumentation for flow and heat transfer measurements has been acquired in the past years and is continuing to expand and grow. The laboratory is equipped with:

Multiple low/high power lasers used as source of illumination for flow visualization and measurements
Multiple Particle Image Velocimetry systems with high speed/High resolution cameras
The Laser Doppler Velocimetry system

We have developed advanced techniques to perform high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the flow. Advanced temperature measurement techniques are also in place in the laboratory, using Distributed Temperature Sensors (DTS) and Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF).

Computational Tools and Software

Thermal-Hydraulic computer codes are in use in our laboratory. Our expertise cover a wide range of system-level codes and Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) codes.

System and Subchannel Codes:

RELAP5 and RELAP5-3D
MELCOR
GOTHIC
MAAP
RETRAN
TRACE
COBRA-TF
CATHARE

Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) Codes:

ANSYS Fluent
ANSYS CFX
CD-ADAPCO StarCCM+

Nek5000
OpenFOAM
Saturne
Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) – Based codes