An experimental study on the effect of liquid properties on the counter-current flow limitation (CCFL) during gas/liquid counter-current two-phase flow in a 1/30 scaled-down of Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) hot leg geometry

Abstract

To promote the safety of the nuclear reactors, numerous authors have carried out investigations of gas/liquid counter-current two-phase flow in order to understand the characteristics during the inception of flooding or CCFL. The present work covers an experimental and analytical study on the effect of liquid properties on CCFL characteristics in a complex geometry representing 1/30 scaled-down version of a German-Konvoi PWR hot leg. The obtained results reveal that the gas velocity to initiate the flooding monotonically decreases with the increase of the liquid velocity. At high liquid flow rates, it is noticed that with the increase of glycerol percentage, the gas flow rate needed to initiate the flooding significantly decrease due to either the increase in liquid viscosity or the decrease in corresponding surface tension. Here under the same flow condition, the flooding is initiated faster by the higher glycerol percentage. Moreover, instead of the well-known Wallis superficial velocity, the Kutateladze-type parameter or a combination of the Wallis parameter and liquid property numbers by Zapke & Kröger (1996) which were previously proposed by numerous authors to investigate the effects of liquid properties on CCFL characteristics, a modified non-dimensional Wallis parameter combined with the inverse viscosity number introduced by Ma et al. (2020) is found herein to more accurately correlate the present experimental data. Through a dimensional similarity analysis, a new empirical correlation reveals that the liquid Froude number is the greatest determinant of CCFL characteristics with respect to the effect of the liquid properties.