Erosion of a confined stratified layer by a vertical jet – Detailed assessment of a CFD approach against the OECD/NEA PSI benchmark

Highlights: • Systematic of a U-RANS approach, capable to be applied at containment scale. • Validation against measured and derived point-wise and field data. • Validation by means of transported quantities (concentration) but also underlying flow field and turbulent kinetic energy. • U-RANS approach yields in overall consistent and plausible results. • But unexpected difference in SST and k–ε identified for free-stream flow. - Abstract: Recently, a blind CFD benchmark exercise was conducted by the OECD/NEA (2013–2014) based on an experiment in the PANDA facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, investigating the turbulent erosion of a stratified helium rich layer in the upper region of the test vessel by means of a vertical air-helium jet impinging from below. In addition to the 'classical' pointwise measurements available for similar experiments conducted in the past, significant additional efforts were spent on the experimental characterization of the underlying flow field and turbulent quantities by means of particle image velocimetry (PIV) for the benchmark. This data is well suited for a detailed assessment of the driving jet flow and its interaction with the stratified layer. Both are essential in order to avoid elimination of different errors, which is possible if validation is performed in a global manner. Different impacts on the simulation results, in particular on the jet profile and on the mixing progress, are discussed in this paper. A systematic validation is carried out based on measured and derived quantities. It is identified that e.g. the mesh resolution in the jet and mixing zone has only a minor impact, while small changes in turbulence modeling strategy or the chosen model constants, like Sc_t, significantly affect the simulation results. Finally, the chosen unsteady RANS model represents mixing process consistently in the transient progression and instantaneous flow variables, while an unexpected difference between the k–ε-SST and the standard k–ε model in predicting the jet flow was identified.