Experimental Investigation on Dependence of Decontamination Factor on Aerosol Number Concentration in Pool Scrubbing Under Normal Temperature and Pressure

Abstract

During a severe accident of a nuclear reactor, radioactive aerosols may be released from degraded nuclear fuels. Pool scrubbing is one of the efficient filters with a high aerosol removal efficiency, in other words a high decontamination factor (DF). Because of its high performance, many pool scrubbing experiments have been performed and several pool scrubbing models have been proposed. In the existing pool scrubbing experiments, an experimental condition of aerosol number concentration was seldom taken into account. It is probably because DF is assumed to be independent of aerosol number concentration, at least, in the concentration where aerosol coagulation is limited. The existing pool scrubbing models also follow this assumption. In order to verify this assumption, we performed a pool scrubbing experiment with different aerosol number concentrations under the same boundary conditions. The test section is a transparent polycarbonate pipe with an inner diameter of 0.2 m. 0.5 μm SiO2 particles were used as aerosols. As a result, DF was increasing as decreasing the aerosol number concentration. In order to ensure a reliability of this result, three validation tests were performed with meticulous care. According to the results of these validation tests, it was indicated that DF dependence on the aerosol concentration was not because of our experimental system error including measurement instruments but a real phenomenon of the pool scrubbing.