Numerical investigation of the water draining process pushed by gas for several manifolds with different header-diameter

Abstract

In the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), the manifolds play an important role in the blow-out process, which directly affects the dryness of the plasma facing components (PFCs) and the entire drying system. This will cause corrosion of PFCs and coolant leakage, which will seriously affect the safe operation of the device. Therefore, it is necessary to study the gas–liquid​ two-phase flow characteristics of the manifold during the blowout process. In this paper, the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) method was used to simulate the gas–liquid blowout process of the manifold with different header-diameters, and to discuss the influence mechanism of the change of header-diameter on the blowout effect. Under the boundary condition of a gas supply with a certain pressure difference, it can be found that enlarging the header-diameter can enhance the uniformity of the flow of branches, improve the inlet gas flow rate of manifold, which conductively improve the dryness of the manifold. The research results in this paper will provide reference for improving the dryness of internal components and drying systems, and also for the construction of future fusion reactor drying systems.