A Study on the Convective Mass Transfer of Nitrogen to Water for a Gas Pressurizing System

Mass transfer due to a concentration difference of nitrogen can occur in a nuclear system. Our research work seeks to analyze and understand the mass transfer phenomena of nitrogen in water under the condition of a natural convection using the commercially available CFD computer model, FLUENT 6.3. The maximum solubility was employed to express the boundary condition at an interface between the nitrogen and water. First, the case that nitrogen was transferred to water by only a diffusion was simulated to verify the application of the UDS (User defined scalar) model in FLUENT 6.3 for a mass transfer. Diffusion equation, which was described as a PDE (Partial Differential Equation) with non-homogeneous boundary conditions, was solved and the solved results of the PDE showed a good agreement with those of the FLUENT simulation in the same condition. The same cylinder geometry with that of the diffusion case was used to estimate the convective mass transfer. By the natural convection caused by the thermal boundary condition, the mass transfer of nitrogen had a convection effect. The result of FLUENT 6.3 to compute the convective mass transfer showed that the nitrogen was transferred simultaneously in the entire region by the convection effect and it took about several hours until the mole fraction of nitrogen in the water side reached 50% of the maximum saturated value. The averaged mass transfer coefficient was calculated and compared with the results obtained from the heat and mass transfer analogy. The calculated coefficients showed the lower value than those obtained from the various correlations. When the steam mass transfer toward the gas side was negligible, the pressure drop of the gas side due to the reduced nitrogen caused by a mass transfer was computed using the ideal gas law and the Custom Field Function model in the FLUENT 6.3.