Debris bed coolability using a 3-D two phase model in a porous medium

During a severe nuclear accident, a part of the molten corium resulting from the core degradation may relocate in the lower plenum of the reactor vessel. In order to predict the safety margin of the reactor under such conditions, the coolability of this porous heat-generating medium is evaluated in this study and compared with other investigations. In this work, conservation equations derived for debris beds are implemented in the three dimensional thermal-hydraulic module of the CATHARE code. The coolant flow is a two phase flow with phase change. The momentum balance equation for each fluid phase is an extension of Darcy's law. This extension takes into account the capillary effects between the two phases, the relative permeabilities and passabilities of each phase, the interfacial drag force between liquid and gas, and the porous bed configuration (porosity, particle diameter,... ). The model developed is three-dimensional which is important to better predict the flow in configuration such as counter-current flow or to emphasize preferential ways induced by porous geometry. The energy balance equations of the three phases (liquid, gas and solid phase) are obtained by a volume averaging process of the local conservation equations. In this method, the local thermal non-equilibrium between the three phases is considered and the heat exchanges, the phase change rate as well as the thermal dispersion coefficients are calculated as a function of the local geometry of the porous medium. Such a method allows the numerical estimation of these thermal properties which are very difficult to determine experimentally. This feature is a great advantage of this approach. After a brief description of the thermal-hydraulic model, one-dimensional predictions of critical dryout fluxes are presented and compared with results from the literature. Reasonable agreement is obtained. Then a two-dimensional calculation is presented and shows the influence of the porous medium characteristics. As expected, water supply is greater considering multi dimensional flow in the bed and the dryout heat flux is larger than predicted by 1-D modeling. This model will be used in the core degradation code ICARE/CATHARE to perform safety studies on in-vessel retention of debris. (authors)