Development and Validation of a Porous Medium Computational Fluid Dynamics Model for a Jet

Abstract

The fast boron shutdown injection in a PHWR consists of a jet flowing through a very large moderator tank that contains an array of cylindrical coolant channels. The accurate prediction of the turbulent jet mixing is required to determine an accurate distribution of boron inside the moderator tank to model the insertion of negative reactivity into the reactor during fast shutdown. A CFD code is used to determine the distribution of boron in the moderator tank. The flow is analyzed with a porous medium model based on volume averaged momentum, turbulent kinetic energy, and turbulence dissipation equations. The additional source terms arise due to the averaging must be constituted. The constitutive relations that are implemented in the present model are: (i) the drag force on an array of cylinders for the momentum equations and (ii) the additional mixing effect of the cylinders which results in the sources of turbulent kinetic energy and turbulence dissipation transport model. The CFD analysis is performed on a porous, axis symmetric domain. The CFD results are finally compared with data for the boron concentration distribution obtained in a scaled geometrically similar experiment, demonstrating the validity of the approach.