Numerical Simulation of Liquid Jet Behavior in Shallow Pool by Interface Tracking Method

In the severe accident (SA) of nuclear reactors, fuel and components melt, and melted materials fall to a lower part of a reactor vessel. In the lower part of a reactor vessel, in some sections of the SAs, it is considered that there is a water pool. Then, the melted core materials fall into a water pool in the lower plenum as a jet. The molten material jet is broken up, and heat transfer between molten material and coolant may occur. This process is called a fuel-coolant interaction (FCI). FCI is one of the important phenomena to consider the coolability and distribution of core materials. In this study, the numerical simulation of jet breakup phenomena with a shallow pool was performed by using the developed method (TPFIT). We try to understand the hydrodynamic interaction under various, such as penetration, reach to the bottom, spread, accumulation of the molten material jet. Also, we evaluated a detailed jet spread behavior and examined the influence of lattice resolution and the contact angle. Furthermore, the diameters of atomized droplets were evaluated by using numerical simulation data.