Experiments and analyses on melt-structure-water interactions during severe accidents

This report is the final report for the research project Melt Structure Water Interactions (MSWI). It describes results of analytical and experimental studies concerning MSWI during the course of a hypothetical core meltdown accident in a LWR. Emphasis has been placed on phenomena which govern vessel failure mode and timing and the mechanisms and properties which govern the fragmentation and breakup of melt jets and droplets. It was found that: 2-D effects significantly diminished the focusing effect of an overlying metallic layer on top of an oxide melt pool. This result improves the feasibility of in-vessel retention of a melt pool through external cooling of the lower head; phenomena related to hole ablation and melt discharge, in the event of vessel failure, are affected significantly by crust formation; the jet fragmentation process is a function of many related phenomena. The fragmentation rate depends not only on the traditional parameters but also on the melt physical properties, which change as the melt cools down from liquid to solid temperature; film boiling was investigated by developing a two-phase flow model and inserting it in a multi-D fluid dynamics code. It was concluded that the thickness of the film on the surface of a melt jet would be small and that the effects of the film on the process should not be large. This conclusion is contrary to the modeling employed in some other codes. The computer codes were developed and validated against the data obtained in the MSWI Project. The melt vessel interaction thermal analysis code describes the process of melt pool formation and convection and the resulting vessel thermal loadings. In addition, several innovative models were developed to describe the melt-water interaction process. The code MELT-3D treats the melt jet as a collection of particles whose movement is described with a three-dimensional Eulerian formulation. The model (SIPHRA) tracks the melt jet with an additional equation, using the level set algorithm