The Investigation of Minor Losses in T-Pipe Flow

It is now known explicitly how to calculate the pressure losses due to a developed flow in a pipe. As for pipe system, for simplicity, the minor losses caused by valves, elbows, enlargements, inlets, outlets, and other fittings was considered to be ignorable when compared with the frictional losses. However, actually, this is not always the case. In the work designing the safety rods for next generation of fast reactor, the inner structure which makes a large part of contribution to the pressure drop when the liquid sodium flow through them, should be considered carefully. In this case, the pressure losses due to T-joint need to be calculated. And unfortunately, empirical formulas couldn’t be found through the combination of survey and the huge quantity of reference data to solve the problem perfectly. In this paper, several simplified models are proposed to calculate to minor loss in T-pipe, which could be implied to the calculation of pressure drop of safety nod, and by comparing their feather, the most reasonable model is found. It has been found that even different models give different results of minor losses, the total pressure drop of the control rod, however, deviates no more than five percent.