A numerical simulation of jet breakup in melt coolant interactions

During a hypothetical severe accident of a light water reactor (LWR), molten corium could fall in the form of jet into a water pool. The jet fragmentation is crucial process during fuel coolant interactions (FCI) which fragment into droplets and disperse in the coolant, and it may cause a steam explosion. This paper deals with a study of computational fluid dynamics on the melt jet falling into a water pool in order to get qualitative and quantitative understanding of initial premixing phase of FCI. The preliminary objectives to pursue are modeling of jet fragmentation and estimation of the jet breakup length. A commercial CFD code ANSYS FLUENT 14.0 is used for the 2D numerical analysis employing Volume of Fluid (VOF) method. The problem and simulation conditions are similar to the jet breakup tests carried out at KTH (Manickam et al., 2014). Initially, a fragmentation/breakup pattern of the jet is discussed. Further, the effect of jet diameter and the jet injection velocity on the jet breakup length is studied, with a wide range of ambient Weber number (Wea) from 1.25 to 1280. The numerical results compared with the experimental data are in a reasonable agreement. The impacts of physical properties of melt (density, viscosity and surface tension) on the jet breakup lengths are also investigated and presented. Finally the droplet size distributions are obtained based on the simulation results. These preliminary data may be helpful to substantiate the understanding of the phenomena during melt jet interactions with coolant.