Gas entrainment in scaled model of pool type LMFBR

The reactor Thermal hydraulics plays an important role for successful operation of Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), which is under construction at Kalpakkam, India. One of the issues to be resolved in PFBR is argon cover gas entrainment problem from free liquid sodium surface. The entrained cover gas may hinder the normal reactor operation. High free surface velocity along with the presence of various immersed components in the hot pool is the cause of gas entrainment from free surface. To reduce the free surface velocity and hence gas entrainment, ring type baffle plates were considered. Initially the optimum geometry of the baffle plate was arrived through numerical analysis using PHOENICS, a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool. Finally the experiments were conducted in a 1/4 scale water model of PFBR primary circuit with selected baffle plate geometry. It was found that a baffle plate with radial width of 125 mm in the model and located above intermediate heat exchanger is very effective to reduce the gas entrainment problem in PFBR. (authors)