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A novel approach towards deployment of a hydrostatic pressure based level monitoring device is presented for continuous monitoring of liquid level in a reservoir with high resolution and precision. Some of the major drawbacks such as spurious information of measured level due to change in ambient temperature, requirement of high resolution pressure sensor, and bubbling effect by passing air or any gaseous fluid into the liquid are overcome by using such a newly designed hydrostatic pressure based level monitoring device. The technique involves precise measurement of hydrostatic pressure exerted by the process liquid using a high sensitive pulsating-type differential pressure sensor (capacitive type differential pressure sensor using a specially designed oil manometer) and correlating it to the liquid level. In order to avoid strong influence of temperature on liquid level, a temperature compensation methodology is derived and used in the system. A wireless data acquisition feature has also been provided in the level monitoring device in order to work in a remote area such as a radioactive environment. At the outset, a prototype level measurement system for a 1 m tank is constructed and its test performance has been well studied. The precision, accuracy, resolution, uncertainty, sensitivity, and response time of the prototype level measurement system are found to be less than 1.1 mm in the entire range, 1%, 3 mm, <1%, 10 Hz/mm, and ∼4 s, respectively.

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The dynamics of rising bubbles in a liquid sodium pool plays a significant role in the estimation of the radiological source term during anticipated transients and normal operation of a fast reactor. Sodium is chemically reactive with air and water. Therefore, carrying out experiments using sodium on a reactor scale level requires extra precautions. We report an in-house experimental technique to depict the bubble dynamics along with numerical support to establish similarity behavior between water and liquid sodium, to reduce the number of experiments in sodium systems for in-depth knowledge of bubble dynamics in the case of the fast breeder reactor. In the present work, 3-D bubble dynamics is studied in the OpenFOAM platform and the validated numerical model is used to study bubble dynamics in sodium to establish similitude between the water and sodium systems. The bubble aspect ratio of 0.9 cm diameter bubbles in the sodium system is found to be in close agreement with that of 0.5 cm bubbles in the water system. Experimental and numerical findings suggest similarity of the aspect ratio between water and scaled-up sodium systems. The similarity criteria established between water and sodium are found to be very useful in conducting water-based experiments to study bubble dynamics in sodium systems.