Jet Breakup and Droplet Formation in Immiscible Liquid-Liquid System

Abstract

Mitigative measures against the event of a core disruptive accident (CDA) are of the importance from the viewpoint of safety of a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR). If the CDA occurs, the so-called post-accident heat removal must be surely achieved. The present study focuses on the scenario that the molten materials are injected into the lower plenum as jets. The jet breakup behavior during the CDA will be very complicated. Therefore, a specialized study on the fundamental process during the jet breakup is believed to be an effective approach. The aim of this paper is to understand the fundamental process of hydrodynamic interaction of jet breakup and droplet formation Using the immiscible liquid-liquid system, water and silicon oil as the test fluids, visualization via high-speed videography was performed. From the visualization results, the breakup length and droplet diameter were measured by image processing. The experimental data were scaled with ambient Weber number. When the Weber number was smaller than 1, the droplet diameter was close to the nozzle diameter, and distribution of droplet size was not observed. When the Weber number exceeded 1, the breakup length became longer and the generated droplet diameter possessed a distribution with two peaks due to satellite droplet formation. In both cases, the droplet formed at the leading edge of jet. In case that Weber number is around 100, the droplets were formed by entrainment of interfacial wave at jet side. From the mass median diameter data, we can see that the increase of the Weber number caused the decrease of median diameter and the increase of the width of the distribution.