A numerical study on turbulence attenuation model for liquid droplet impingement erosion

The bent pipe wall thinning has been often found at the elbow of the drain line and the high-pressure secondary feed-water bent pipe in the nuclear reactors. The liquid droplet impingement (LDI) erosion could be regarded to be one of the major causes and is a significant issue of the thermal hydraulics and structural integrity in aging and life extension for nuclear power plants safety. In this paper two-phase numerical simulations are conducted for standard elbow geometry, typically the pipe diameter is 170 mm. The turbulence attenuation in vapor-droplets flow is analysed by a damping function on the energy spectrum basis of single phase flow. Considering the vapor turbulent kinetic energy attenuation due to the involved droplets, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) tool has been adopted by using two-way vapor-droplet coupled system. This computational fluid model is built up by incompressible Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stoke equations using standard k–ε model and the SIMPLE algorithm, and the numerical droplet model adopts the Lagrangian approach, a general LDI erosion prediction procedure for bent pipe geometry has been performed to supplement the CFD code. The liquid droplets diameter, velocity, volume concentration are evaluated for the effects of carrier turbulence attenuation. The result shows that carrier turbulence kinetic energy attenuation is proved to be an important effect for LDI erosion rate when investigating the bent pipe wall thinning phenomena.

Research highlights
► Applying a carrier turbulence algorithm attenuation to liquid droplet impingement (LDI) phenomena in two phase flow.
► Proposing a computational procedure to LDI erosion rate in a bent pipe.
► Investigating the carrier turbulence attenuation influence to the LDI erosion rate.