Gas entrainment by one single French PWR spray, SARNET-2 spray benchmark

Highlights: • This paper presents a benchmark performed in the frame of the SARNET-2 EU project. • It concerns momentum transfer between a PWR spray and the surrounding gas. • The entrained gas velocities can vary up to 100% from one code to another. • Simplified boundary conditions for sprays are generally used by the code users. • It is shown how these simplified conditions impact the gas entrainment. - Abstract: This paper presents a benchmark performed in the frame of the SARNET-2 EU project, dealing with momentum transfer between a real-scale PWR spray and the surrounding gas. It presents a description of the IRSN tests on the CALIST facility, the participating codes (8 contributions), code-experiment and code-to-code comparisons. It is found that droplet velocities are almost well calculated one meter below the spray nozzle, even if the spread of the spray is not recovered and the values of the entrained gas velocity vary up to 100% from one code to another. Concerning sensitivity analysis, several 'simplifications' have been made by the contributors, especially based on the boundary conditions applied at the location where droplets are injected. It is shown here that such simplifications influence droplet and entrained gas characteristics. The next step will be to translate these conclusions in terms of variables representative of interesting parameters for nuclear safety