Experimental Study of the Sub-Channel Flow Regimes in 5×5 Rod Bundles With Simplified Grid Spacer

Traditionally, the flow regime in two phase flow in rod bundles are considered in a global sense by the visualization. However, a sub-channel flow regime is required to understand and model the two phase flow structures in rod bundles. In this work, a sub-channel impedance meter was designed to get the dynamic feature in the sub-channels, which was applied to identify the sub-channel flow regime by the fast search and finding peaks of the cumulative probability distribution functions (CPDFs) objectively. In the present study, five flow regimes, namely bubbly flow, quasi-cap bubbly flow, quasi-slug flow, cap-turbulent flow and churn-turbulent flow were defined and recognized. The sub-channel flow regimes at the same cross section were compared to each other, which show similar feature with the local flow regimes in pipe. It is possible to identify nine different global flow regime configurations by combining the corner, side and inner sub-channel flow regime at the same cross section, which was drawn in the 2D sub-channel flow regime.