Because a pool scrubbing is important for reducing radioactive aerosols to the environment for a nuclear reactor in a severe accident situation, many researches have been performed. However, decontamination factor (DF) dependence on aerosol concentration was seldom considered in an aerosol number concentration with limited aerosol coagulation. To investigate an existence of DF dependence on the concentration, DF in a pool scrubbing with 2.4 m water submergence was derived from aerosol measurements by light scattering aerosol spectrometers. It was observed that DF increased monotonically with decreasing particle number concentration in a constant thermohydraulic condition: a gradual increase from 10 to 32 in the range of 1.3×1011 - 8.0×1011/m3 at the inlet and a significant increase from 32 to 77 in the range of 3.6×1010 - 1.3×1011/m3. Two validation experiments were conducted in the range with the gradual DF increase to confirm whether the DF dependence is a real pool scrubbing phenomenon. In addition, characteristics of the DF dependence in different water submergences were investigated experimentally. It was found that the DF dependence became more significant in higher water submergence. Significant DF dependence was observed in the condition of the water submergence higher than 1.6 m and the inlet particle number concentration less than around 1×1011 /m3. It is recommended to perform further analysis for the DF dependence mainly in such condition since it could make a difference to both experiment and model of the pool scrubbing.
Many thermohydraulic issues about the safety of light water reactors are related to complicated two-phase flow phenomena. In these phenomena, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis using the volume of fluid (VOF) method causes numerical diffusion generated by the first-order upwind scheme used in the convection term of the volume fraction equation. Thus, in this study, we focused on an interface compression (IC) method for such a VOF approach; this technique prevents numerical diffusion issues and maintains boundedness and conservation with negative diffusion. First, on a sufficiently high mesh resolution and without the IC method, the validation process was considered by comparing the amplitude growth of the interfacial wave between a two-dimensional gas sheet and a quiescent liquid using the linear theory. The disturbance growth rates were consistent with the linear theory, and the validation process was considered appropriate. Then, this validation process confirmed the effects of the IC method on numerical diffusion, and we derived the optimum value of the IC coefficient, which is the parameter that controls the numerical diffusion.
During a severe accident of a nuclear reactor, radioactive aerosols may be released from degraded nuclear fuels. Pool scrubbing is one of the efficient filters with a high aerosol removal efficiency, in other words a high decontamination factor (DF). Because of its high performance, many pool scrubbing experiments have been performed and several pool scrubbing models have been proposed. In the existing pool scrubbing experiments, an experimental condition of aerosol number concentration was seldom taken into account. It is probably because DF is assumed to be independent of aerosol number concentration, at least, in the concentration where aerosol coagulation is limited. The existing pool scrubbing models also follow this assumption. In order to verify this assumption, we performed a pool scrubbing experiment with different aerosol number concentrations under the same boundary conditions. The test section is a transparent polycarbonate pipe with an inner diameter of 0.2 m. 0.5 μm SiO2 particles were used as aerosols. As a result, DF was increasing as decreasing the aerosol number concentration. In order to ensure a reliability of this result, three validation tests were performed with meticulous care. According to the results of these validation tests, it was indicated that DF dependence on the aerosol concentration was not because of our experimental system error including measurement instruments but a real phenomenon of the pool scrubbing.
Pool scrubbing is one of the effective mechanisms to filter out radioactive aerosols in a severe accident of a nuclear reactor. A lot of work has been done on the pool scrubbing models and experiments. However, large discrepancies still exist between the simulation and experimental results. To improve the pool scrubbing model, an accurate decontamination factor (DF) evaluation by an aerosol measurement and a detailed two-phase flow structure measurement is inevitable. A pool scrubbing experimental apparatus was constructed by the thermohydraulic safety research group in Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The test section is a transparent pipe with the inner diameter of 0.2 m and the length of about 4.5 m. The aerosol laden air flow was injected upwardly into the pool water. The aerosol particle diameter distribution was measured by a light scattering aerosol spectrometer. White polydisperse BaSO4 particles were used as the aerosol test particles. In the first step, we focused on investigating and reducing the error of DF experimentally. Several problems resulting in the error and their solutions for the error reduction were summarized in this paper. Based on the error reduction methods, the DFs of pool scrubbing were measured in two water submergences. The results showed that the DFs for the aerosol with small diameter were independent of the injecting air velocity in the submergence of 0.3 m. In addition, it was found that the DFs increased with increasing the air flow rate in the submergence of 2.9 m. It was presumed that the increase of DF was dominated by the increase of bubble surface area and/or turbulence intensity with the air flow rate increase, while the effect of the reduced bubble traveling time in the water, which may reduce the DF, was smaller than the increasing effect.
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