CFD simulation of hydrogen mixing and mitigation by means of passive auto-catalytic recombiners

Modeling of passive auto-catalytic recombiners (PARs) operation in containment geometries involves a large variety of scales; thus, a CFD calculation resolving all these scales would be much too expensive. Therefore, the mechanistic PAR model REKO-DIREKT, developed at Forschungszentrum Juelich, has been coupled with the commercial CFD code ANSYS CFX in order to simulate PAR operation as well as the induced flow and transport phenomena. Based on a short introduction of REKO-DIREKT, its interface to CFX and the explicit coupling scheme is discussed. The paper is finalized by a first demonstration of simulation capabilities on the basis of the ThAI PAR-4 experiment (Becker Technologies GmbH, Eschborn, Germany). (author)