Fluid dynamic analysis of a catalytic recombiner to remove hydrogen

Abstract

Catalytic reacting surfaces in recombiners are a reliable way to remove hydrogen as well as other burnable gases like CO in a passive way from the containment atmosphere of a nuclear power plant (NPP) during an accident. Industrial mature designs are ready to be installed in large dry containments to act as a mitigation measure preferably in the case of severe accidents. Experiments have been carried out to study manifold aspects of recombiners like the efficiency of hydrogen removal, start-up conditions, poisoning, oxygen starvation, steam and water impact and others. Mostly the global behaviour of a given device in a larger environment has been investigated in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and to facilitate the derivation of simplified models for long-term severe accident analyses. There are a number of reasons to look inside a recombiner to understand the interaction of chemistry and flow. This can help in understanding the dependencies of non-measurable variables (e.g. reaction rate), of local surface temperatures and more. It also offers possibilities to increase the chemical efficiency by optimising the geometry properly. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes are available to be used as development tools to include the specifics of catalytic surface reactions. The present paper describes the use of the code system CFX (CFX 4.1 Flow Solver User Guide. 1995, Computational Fluid Dynamics Services, AEA Technology plc, Oxfordshire, UK) for creating a recombiner model. Finally its comparison with existing test data is discussed.