Efficient global sensitivity analysis for flow-induced vibration of a nuclear reactor assembly using Kriging surrogates

•Surrogate modeling is used to support a global sensitivity analysis (GSA) for a nuclear reactor assembly to demonstrate both the pertinence of such methods to this application as well as the significant physical insights provided by GSA.•Insight gained from the accuracy of the GSA results may be used to compare with goodness-of-fit metrics which are traditionally used to support the verification of the surrogate model.•The coupled use of surrogate modeling and GSA reduces the number of full-order simulations required, substantially reducing total computational cost.•Numerical experiments based upon an upper internals assembly of a pressurized water reactor subjected to multiple types of loadings are used to evaluate the relationship between sensitivities computed from a full-order model versus those computed from a surrogate model.•For large sample sizes, negligible variation in the resultant sensitivities is shown with respect to the particular method by which a computational design of experiment is constructed to train the Kriging surrogates which lends credence to the stability of the results.