Abstract

Jet impingement heat transfer is a specialized area of heat transfer having numerous industrial applications involving fast and localized heating or cooling. In the very rare case of a nuclear reactor core melt-down accident scenario, the molten corium (a mixture of nuclear fuel and structural material) jet with its large heat content is capable of breaching solid structures with which they come into contact. Simulation experiments have been conducted at SED, IGCAR to study the jet ablation of solid structures, using high temperature Wood’s metal jet directed towards solid wood’s metal plate. The objective of the present work is to predict the ablation or melt through time of the plate by numerical heat transfer analysis. The computational model is also used to carry out a parametric study by varying the jet velocity and plate thickness. Comprehensive CFD analysis of impinging jet with melting entails huge computational resources. Hence in this study, an effective conductivity model has been employed to predict the solid plate melt-through time by jet impingement. Available Nusselt number empirical correlations for stagnation point heat transfer in low Prandtl number fluids are collected from literature. For the experimental conditions, Nusselt number is evaluated using the relevant correlation. Effective conductivity (keff) is then computed from Nusselt number. Making use of this keff value, which accounts for the enhanced heat transfer due to the jet, transient heat conduction equation is solved numerically. Temperature profile across the plate is obtained as a function of time and melt-through time is estimated. The computed result is validated with the experimental result.

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