Experimental and numerical approaches of aerosols removal in spray for nuclear reactor containment application

Abstract

Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.

TOSQAN is an experimental program undertaken by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) in order to perform thermal hydraulic containment studies. The TOSQAN facility is a large enclosure devoted to simulate typical accidental thermal hydraulic flow conditions in nuclear Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) containment. The TOSQAN facility, which is highly instrumented with non-intrusive optical diagnostics, is particularly adapted to nuclear safety CFD code validation. The present work is devoted to study the interaction of a water spray injection used as a mitigation means in order to reduce the gas pressure and temperature in the containment, to produce gases mixing and washout of fission products. In order to have a better understanding of heat and mass transfers between the spray droplets and the gas mixture, and to analyze mixing effects due to spray activation, we performed detailed characterization of the two-phase flow.