Abstract

Nuclear power plant (NPP) safety has become a public issue since the Fukushima daiichi NPP accident. In order to evaluate the risks caused by severe accidents (SAs), it is very important to understand the on-site source term events. One of the important unsolved source term events is the decontamination efficiency of fission products (FPs) in the suppression chamber by pool scrubbing. Therefore, a mechanistic model to analyze the particle decontamination efficiency by pool scrubbing is highly regarded. Despite the demand, particle decontamination mechanism by pool scrubbing has never been understood due to the complexity of phenomena.

In our experiment, we aim to develop a reliable mechanistic model to evaluate particle decontamination efficiency of pool scrubbing by conducting separate effect tests. As to obtain the fundamental process of particle decontamination from gas to liquid-phase, we focused on decontamination factor (DF) of particle from a single bubble. However, it is very difficult to calculate the initial particle concentration inside the bubble. Therefore, in our experiment, we developed a method to measure the internal particle concentration inside the bubble by combining image processing and particle measurement.

By using the experimental results, we succeeded to obtain reasonable DF for glycerin particles and CsI particles as a simulant particle for FPs. From the experimental results, detailed particle decontamination efficiency for various submergence were measured. The results tend show that DF increase linearly as submergence increases which suggests that DF is constant on bubble rise region. Moreover, the fact that glycerin particle with larger particle diameter takes a higher value shows that particle diameter significantly affects DF.

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