Production of droplets during liquid jet impingement onto a flat plate

If leakage of coolant takes place in sodium-cooled fast reactor, sodium fire may occur to increase the possibility of failure of the containment vessel. Since combustion is surface reaction, the surface area of discharged liquid sodium is of significant importance in evaluating the influence of sodium fire. When sodium is discharged as a liquid jet, a number of droplets are produced during liquid jet impingement with the structures such as wall, floor, ceiling, and so on. Accurate evaluation of surface area of produced droplets is important since it acts as the reaction field. In the present work, liquid jet was discharged from nozzle to be impinged with a horizontal plate. The flow direction was vertical downward and several liquids of different viscosities and surface tension coefficients were used as the test liquids. The total amount of the splashed droplets was measured under varied experimental conditions of nozzle diameter, fall height and flow rate. Dimensionless correlation was developed for the splashing rate using the experimental data accumulated in present work. (author)