Annular-intermittent flow regime transition model and its application to boil-off pattern transition and dryout model

A model is developed to describe the transition of annular flow to intermittent flow in a vertical two-phase flow system. The instability of the disturbance wave, which is a dominant wave shape at the boundary between annular flow and intermittent flow, is considered as the governing mechanism and this instability is described by the concept of hyperbolicity breaking in the characteristic equation. The developed model is validated by comparing its predictions of gas superficial velocity for the transition with the experimental data available from the literature, and comparing those with the predictions of the other correlations. The comparison results show that the developed model gives better predictions for the transition condition than the existing correlations and the effects of fluid properties, geometry and liquid flow rate on the transition are well considered by the developed model. It is found that the predictions of the developed model have much smaller bias than those of the other correlations; the average of the prediction error is 3% for the present model. The standard deviation of the prediction errors of the present model reaches 28%, which is the smallest among the models compared here. Through the core uncovery experiments, it has been known that the low power and high power core boil-off patterns are observed in the high pressure core uncovery following a small-break loss-of-coolant accident. The developed model for the annular to intermittent flow regime transition was applied to the classification of low power boil-off and high power boil-off patterns. At first, the applicability of the developed criterion to the rod-bundle geometry is demonstrated using the flow pattern transition data taken by Bergles et al. and Venkateswararao. It is shown that the developed criterion well predicts the boundary between low power boil-off and high power boil-off through the comparisons of the predicted annular to intermittent flow transition conditions with the boil-off experiment data taken by Anklam and Osakabe. The developed annular to intermittent flow regime transition criterion was applied to the prediction of CHF with the existing dryout model. The initial conditions such as the film thickness and the void fraction at the onset of annular flow are required for the analytical dryout model. The experimental CHF conditions for the uniformly heated tube were compared with the predictions by a selected analytical dryout model with the initial conditions estimated by the developed flow regime transition criterion. Good agreement between the experimental results and the predictions were found