Interaction between a fluid at high temperature and a concrete: contribution to the modeling of heat and mass transfers

In the late phases of some scenario of hypothetical severe accident in Pressurized Water Reactors, a molten mixture of core and vessel structures, called corium, comes to interact with the concrete basemat. The safety numerical tools are lumped parameter codes. They are based on a large averaged description of heat and mass transfers which raises some uncertainties about the multi-scale description of the exchanges but also about the adopted boundary layer structure in the vicinity of the ablation front. In this context, the aim of this work is to tackle the problem of the boundary layer structure by means of direct numerical simulation. This work joins within the more general framework of a multi-scale description and a multi-scale modeling, namely from the local scale associated with the vicinity of the ablation front to the scale associated with the lumped parameter codes. Such a multi-scale description raises not only the problem of the local description of the multiphase multicomponent flow but also the problem of the up-scaling between the local- and the macro-scale which is associated with the convective structures within the pool of corium. Here, we are particularly interested in the building of effective boundary conditions or wall laws for macro-scale models. The difficulty of the multiphase multicomponent problem at the local scale leads us to consider a relatively simplified problem. Effective boundary conditions are built in the frame of a domain decomposition method and numerical experiments are performed for a natural convection problem in a stamp shaped cavity to assess the validity of the proposed wall laws. Even if the treated problem is still far from the target applications, this contribution can be viewed as a first step of a multi-scale modeling of the exchanges for the molten core concrete issue. In the more complicated case of multiphase multicomponent flows, it is necessary to have a direct numerical simulation tool of the flow at the local scale to build wall laws for macro-scale models. Here, the developed tool corresponds to a Cahn-Hilliard/Navier-Stokes model for a two-phase compositional system. It relies on a description of the system by three volume fractions and on a free energy composed by a two-phase part and a compositional part. The governing equations are derived in the frame of the thermodynamic of irreversible processes. They are solved on the basis of a finite element application of the object-oriented software component library PELICANS. Several numerical experiments illustrate the validity and the potentialities of application of this tool on two-phase compositional problems. Finally, using the developed tool, we tackle by means of direct numerical simulation the problem boundary layer structure in the vicinity of the ablation front for limestone-sand and siliceous concretes. (author)