Jianjun Xiao

Non-Boussinesq Integral Model for Horizontal Turbulent Buoyant Round Jets

Horizontal buoyant jet is a fundamental flow regime for hydrogen safety analysis in power industry. The purpose of this study is to develop a fast non-Boussinesq engineering model the horizontal buoyant round jets. Verification of this integral model is established with available experimental data and comparisons over a large range of density variations with the CFD codes GASFLOW. The model has proved to be an efficient engineering tool for predicting horizontal strongly buoyant round jets.

Non-Boussinesq Integral Model for Horizontal Turbulent Strongly Buoyant Plane Jets

Horizontal buoyant jets are fundamental flow regimes for hydrogen safety analyses in the nuclear power plants. Integral model is an efficient, fast running engineering tool that can be used to obtain the jet trajectory, centerline dilution and other properties of the flow. In the published literature, most of the integral models that are used to predict the horizontal buoyant jet behavior employ the Boussinesq approximation, which limits the density range between the jets and the ambient. CorJet, a long researched, developed, and established commercial model, is such a Boussinesq model, and has proved to be accurate and reliable to predict the certain buoyant jet physics. In this study, Boussinesq and non-Boussinesq integral models with modified entrainment hypothesis were developed for modeling horizontal turbulent strongly buoyant plane jets. All the results and data where the Boussinesq model is valid will collapse to CorJet when they are properly normalized, which implies that the calculation is not sensitive to density variations in Boussinesq model. However, non-Boussinesq results will never collapse to CorJet analyses using the same normalized scaling, and the results are dependent on the density variation. The reason is that CorJet employs the Boussinesq approximation in which density variations are only important in the buoyancy term. For hydrogen safety analyses, the large density variation between hydrogen and the ambient, which is normally the mixture of air and steam, will make the Boussinesq approximation invalid, and the effect of the density variation on the inertial mass of the fluid can not neglected. This study highlights the assumption of the Boussinesq approximation as a limiting, simplified theory for strongly buoyant jets. A generalized scaling theory for horizontal strongly buoyant jet seems not to exist when the Boussinesq approximation is not applicable. This study also reveals that the density variation between jets and the ambient should be less than 10% to accurately model horizontal buoyant jets when the Boussinesq approximation is applied. Verification of this integral model is established with available data and comparisons over a large range of density variations with the CFD codes GASFLOW and Fluent. The model has proved to be an efficient engineering tool for predicting horizontal strongly buoyant plane jets.Copyright

Development and Validation of Two-Way Fluid-Particle Coupling in Turbulent Flows for a CFD Code

A Lagrangian approach was used in CFD code GASFLOW to describe particle dispersion in turbulent flows. One-way coupling between fluid and particle is often used due to its simplicity of implementation. However, in case of higher particle volume fraction or mass loading in the continuous phase, one-way coupling is not sufficient to simulate the interaction between fluid and particles. For instance, the liquid droplets released by a spray nozzle in the nuclear power plant will lead to a strong gas entrainment, and consequently impact the gas flow field. When the volume fraction of the discrete phase is not negligible compared to the continuous phase, the interaction between the continuous fluid and dispersed phase becomes significant. Two-way momentum coupling between fluid and solid particles was developed in CFD code GASFLOW. The dynamics of the discrete particles was solved by an implicit algorithm to ensure the numerical stability. The contribution of all particles to a fluid cell was treated as the source term to the continuous phase which was solved with Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methodology. In order to verify and validate the code, the calculation results were then compared to theoretical results, predictions of other CFD codes and experimental data. Predictions compared favorably with the experimental data. It indicates that the effect of two-way coupling is significant when the volume fraction of discrete phase is not negligible. Two-way coupling of mass, energy and turbulence will be implemented in the future development of the GASFLOW code.Copyright

Numerical Simulations of MISTRA 2009 Campaign for ITER Hydrogen Explosion Mitigation Studies

Nitrogen injection system in the vacuum vessel (VV) was proposed to prevent hydrogen explosions during International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) accident scenario. In previous studies, the nitrogen injection system for the mitigation of the hydrogen explosion risk under wet bypass scenario was investigated using CFD codes, GASFLOW and CAST3M. In order to further verify the capability of the codes, experiments in large scale facility MISTRA were carried out at CEA. In this paper, two cases with and without nitrogen inerting were analyzed using two classical turbulence models in GASFLOW code. Subsequently the numerical results have been compared against the experimental results from MISTRA, showing the effect of the turbulence modelling in the prediction of gas mixing.Copyright