Two Phase Flow Behavior During Pool Scrubbing

In severe accidents of nuclear power plants, large amounts of gas containing radioactive particles are generated. In the process of gas release into the atmosphere, it is needed to suppress the leakage of radioactive material. The gas is decontaminated by moving radioactive particles from the gas phase to the liquid phase. This effect of capturing particles is called pool scrubbing, and it has been verified great decontamination effect. Therefore, it is extremely important to analyze the effect in evaluating the influence to the environment. But study on its principle is not carried out sufficiently. And also we don’t have enough experimental date to analyze the effect. The purpose of this study is to clarify the gas-liquid two-phase flow behavior which is important in elucidating the mechanism of pool scrubbing. Particularly, this study focused on the behavior of bubble generation and breakup after being injected from the nozzle and the flow structure of rising bubbles in the still water. Furthermore, we evaluate the validity of the model used in the existing severe accidents analysis code such as the MELCOR by comparing the model with experimental data. We measure the gas phase jet injected from the upward nozzle inserted to a test water tank. Nozzle diameter, gas phase flow rate, liquid phase temperature, and water depth were used as parameters. Bubble behavior was observed via a high-speed camera. The bubble rising speed, bubble distribution and void fraction were measured by a wire mesh sensor. In previous studies, experiments using non-condensable gas in normal temperature water have been mainly conducted. In order to conduct the experiment under conditions that simulate actual equipment, steam which is a condensable gas was used in this study. Moreover, it is assumed that thermal stratification is formed in the pressure suppression pool during severe accidents. To reproduce this situation, thermal stratification is formed in the test water tank. For bubble behavior and flow phenomenon, the result of using non-condensable gas was compared with that using steam. We consider the influence of formation of a thermal stratification. As described above, the flow phenomenon in the pool scrubbing was visualized and measured. Finally, we discuss the validity of the analysis code by comparing the calculation formula and model in the analysis code with the experiment data.