System for recording and displaying two-phase flow topographies

A system of hardware and software has been developed and used to record and display in various forms details of the countercurrent flow topographies occurring in a scaled Pressurized Water Reactor downcomer annulus. An array of 288 conductivity sensors was mounted in a 1/15 scale PWR annulus. At each moment in time, the state of each probe indicates the presence or absence of water in this immediate vicinity. An electronic data acquisition system records the states of all probes 108 times per second on magnetic tape; software routines retrieve the data and reconstruct visual analogs of the flow topographies. The instantaneous two-phase state of the annulus at each instant can be displayed on a hard copy plotter or on a CRT screen. By synchronizing a camera drive with the CRT display, 16mm films have been made recreating the flow process at full speed and at various slow motion rates. All data obtained are stored in computer files in numerical form and can be subjected to various types of quantitative analysis to assist in advanced code development and verification