Simulation of hydrogen mitigation in catalytic recombiner. Part-II: Formulation of a CFD model

This paper aims at formulation of a model compatible with CFD code to simulate hydrogen distribution and mitigation using a Passive Catalytic Recombiner in the Nuclear power plant containments. The catalytic recombiner is much smaller in size compared to the containment compartments. In order to fully resolve the recombination processes during the containment simulations, it requires the geometric details of the recombiner to be modelled and a very fine mesh size inside the recombiner channels. This component when integrated with containment mixing calculations would result in a large number of mesh elements which may take large computational times to solve the problem. This paper describes a method to resolve this simulation difficulty. In this exercise, the catalytic recombiner alone was first modelled in detail using the best suited option to describe the reaction rate (Prabhudharwadkar et al., 2005 and Prabhudharwadkar et al., 2011). A detailed parametric study was conducted, from which correlations for the heat of reaction (hence the rate of reaction) and the heat transfer coefficient were obtained. These correlations were then used to model the recombiner channels as single computational cells providing necessary volumetric sources/sinks to the energy and species transport equations. This avoids full resolution of these channels, thereby allowing larger mesh size in the recombiners. The above mentioned method was successfully validated using both steady state and transient test problems and the results indicate very satisfactory modelling of the component.

Research highlights
► Hydrogen transport in containment with recombiners is a multi-scale problem.
► A novel methodology worked out to lump the recombiner characteristics.
► Results obtained using commercial code FLUENT are cast in the form of correlations.
► Hence, coarse grids can obtain accurate distribution of H2 in containment.
► Satisfactory working of the methodology is clearly demonstrated.