Study on turbulent modeling in gas entrainment evaluation method

In the design study on a large-scale sodium-cooled fast reactor in Japan (JSFR), the suppression of gas entrainment (GE) phenomena caused by free surface vortices are very important to establish an economically superior design. However, due to the non-linearity and/or locality of the GE phenomena, it is not easy to evaluate the occurrences of the GE phenomena accurately. In other words, the onset condition of the GE phenomena in the JSFR is not predicted easily based on scaled-model and/or partial-model experiments. Therefore, the authors are developing a CFD-based evaluation method in which the non-linearity and locality of the GE phenomena can be considered. In the evaluation method, macroscopic vortex parameters, e.g. circulation, are determined by three-dimensional CFD and then, GE-related parameters, e.g. gas core (GC) length, are calculated by using the Burgers vortex model. This procedure is efficient to evaluate the GE phenomena in the JSFR. However, it is well known that the Burgers vortex model tends to overestimate the GC length due to the lack of considerations on some physical mechanisms. Therefore, in this study, the authors develop a turbulent vortex model to evaluate the GE phenomena more accurately. Then, the improved GE evaluation method with the turbulent viscosity model is validated by analyzing the GC lengths observed in a simple experiment. The evaluation results show that the GC lengths analyzed by the improved method are shorter in comparison to the original method, and give better agreement with the experimental data. (author)