Standard for prevention of gas entrainment phenomena in fast reactors: (I) validations of CFD methods for reproducibilities of gas entrainment phenomena

Abstract

It is of importance for stable operations of sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) to prevent gas entrainment (GE) phenomena due to free surface vortices. The entrained gas flow rate should be below an allowance level. However, theoretical determination of universal onset conditions of GE is difficult due to nonlinear characteristics of GE phenomena. Therefore, the authors have been developing an evaluation method for GE based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. In this study, we determine a suitable CFD method for GE phenomena from several candidates through some numerical benchmarks. As a result, we obtain the following guideline for the vortex-induced gas entrainment. The free vortex flow around the vortex core can be correctly evaluated by using appropriate numerical models, such as sufficient mesh resolution, suitable advection solver, suitable turbulence and free surface modeling. From the geometrical viewpoint, the jagged description of the curved boundary using a rectangular mesh is not suitable since it damps rotating flow. As for turbulence modeling, which is especially investigated in this paper, direct numerical simulation (DNS) without any turbulent model is strongly recommended, but RNG k-ε and LES are acceptable. Lastly, we apply the recommended methods to the numerical analysis of a large-scale (> 1/2) test experiment. The numerical results show good agreement with the onset condition of the GE observed in the experiments. This fact indicates that our recommended CFD methods are applicable to the GE phenomena in SFRs. In the next paper, a GE evaluation method is developed, which can calculate GE occurrences based on the results of numerical simulations performed in accordance with the simulation guideline proposed in this paper. © 2012 Atomic Energy Society of Japan, All Rights Reserved.