Fragmentation of molten metal droplets is an important process in steam explosions caused by melt-coolant interactions. Ciccarelli and Frost (1994) found the formation of melt jets (or spikes) in hot melt drops immersed in water. In order to gain insight into this mechanism, they carried out experiments where melt jets were formed in a stratified water/liquid metal system with local generation of high-pressure vapor at the interface. This paper is dedicated to investigating how melt jets are formed in this mechanism when a stratified water/liquid metal system is analyzed. Also, a study of the most significant parameters in this process is performed. A 2D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation is carried out using ANSYS Fluent software to study these phenomena by having water above hot liquid metal, a vapor film in between and a pressure pulse in the vapor film. The results show that the larger the pressure or density, the greater the melt jet length. In order to confirm this, deep neural network algorithm created by TensorFlow library was implemented to facilitate the understanding of the studied phenomena. The formation of melt jets observed in Ciccarelli and Frost’s experiments is also observed in current simulation.

Volume Subject Area:
2nd Symposium on Development and Applications in Computational Fluid Dynamics
Topics:
Computer simulation, Coolants, Jets, Water, Liquid metals, Vapors, Computational fluid dynamics, Pressure, Simulation, Algorithms, Artificial neural networks, Computer software, Density, Drops, Explosions, High pressure (Physics), Metals, Steam
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