Study on Applicability of Numerical Simulation to Evaluation of Gas Entrainment From Free Surface

An onset condition of gas entrainment (GE) due to free surface vortex has been studied to establish a design of fast breeder reactor with higher coolant velocity than conventional designs, because the GE might cause the reactor operation instability and therefore should be avoided. The onset condition of the GE has been investigated experimentally and theoretically, however, dependency of the vortex type GE on local geometry configuration of each experimental system and local velocity distribution has prevented researchers from formulating the universal onset condition of the vortex type GE. A real scale test is considered as an accurate method to evaluate the occurrence of the vortex type GE, but the real scale test is generally expensive and not useful in the design study of large and complicated FBR systems, because frequent displacement of inner equipments accompanied by the design change is difficult in the real scale test. Numerical simulation seems to be promising method as an alternative to the real scale test. In this research, to evaluate the applicability of the numerical simulation to the design work, numerical simulations were conducted on the basic experimental system of the vortex type GE. This basic experiment consisted of rectangular flow channel and two important equipments for vortex type GE in the channel, i.e. vortex generation and suction equipments. Generated vortex grew rapidly interacting with the suction flow and the grown vortex formed a free surface dent (gas core). When the tip of the gas core or the bubbles detached from the tip of the gas core reached the suction mouth, the gas was entrained to the suction tube. The results of numerical simulation under the experimental conditions were compared to the experiment in terms of velocity distributions and free surface shape. As a result, the numerical simulation showed qualitatively good agreement with experimental data. The numerical simulation results were similar to the experimental results in terms of the shape of free surface dent and the velocity distribution around the vortex, although the GE itself was not completely reproduced due to a lack of enough mesh partition. After confirming the applicability of the numerical simulation to the GE evaluation, several parameters, such as suction velocity and a configuration around suction mouth, were numerically examined to evaluate their influence on the GE. The tendencies of the GE occurrence enhanced by larger suction velocity or suction mouth on bottom surface enhance occurrence of the GE were obtained from the simulation results. These simulation results implied that the numerical simulation has enough potential to be used for the design work.