During the severe accident in nuclear power plants (NPPs), hydrogen is generated due to the zirconium-water reaction and released from the breaks in coolant pipe forming a locally high concentration hydrogen cloud in the steam generator (SG) compartment, which plays a key role for hydrogen safety analysis in NPPs. Accurate prediction of the turbulent dispersion process of hydrogen-steam gas mixture is a critical topic for a successful simulation of the flammable cloud distribution in SG compartment. In this study, the high-fidelity temporal evolution of the hydrogen turbulent dispersion in a SG compartment is performed using the Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) based on the parallel CFD code GASFLOW-MPI to capture more detailed unsteady turbulent information. Firstly, the newly developed DES turbulence model is validated using two turbulent benchmarks, a backward-facing step turbulent flow and a hydrogen turbulent jet. The simulation results are consistent well with the experimental data. Then a SG compartment model including one steam generator, two coolant pumps, a hot leg and two cold legs is built using the specialized auto-mesh generation module. There are two modes of turbulent dispersion behavior due to the turbulent driven force in the containment,i.e. jet dominated by initial monument and plume dominated by buoyancy. The simulation result shows that the decay rate for centerline velocity obeys 1/z law as well as hydrogen volume fraction, indicating a turbulent jet during the steam dominated phase. There is also a relatively long potential core region which could impinge on the bottom concrete floor for the downwards jet. While the hydrogen release transfers from a turbulent jet to a turbulent plume outside the region near the inlet during the hydrogen dominated phase. Different from the turbulent jet, the centerline velocity at the plume region decays with the slope 1/z(1/)3, and the decay rate for the centerline hydrogen volume fraction is 1/z(5/)3 during this phase. Compared with the jet flow, the potential core region of the plume flow is relatively short, forming a hydrogen cloud near the inlet. The combustibility evaluation shows that the combustion clouds can be generated in the source compartment at the hydrogen dominated phase. However, they will be diluted by the following persistent steam injection from the break. This can provide technical support for the design of hydrogen mitigation system. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.