The effect of turbulence modeling on hydrogen jet dispersion inside a compartment space using the HYDRAGON code

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe mitigation of hydrogen in the containment of nuclear reactor after the Loss of Coolant Accident is essential to preserve the structural reliability of the containment. This paper presents the results of the systematic work done by using the HYDRAGON code to investigate the effect of turbulence models on the concentration distribution of hydrogen and to determine the HYDRAGON code thermal-hydraulic simulation capability during a severe accident at the nuclear power plant. The HYDRAGON code is developed by the Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, which is an independent research program. The influence of various types of turbulence models, i.e. a standard k − ϵ model, a re-normalized group (RNG) k − ϵ model, and a realizable k − ϵ model were analyzed and the simulation results were compared with the experimental data. When simulation results were compared to experimental data, it was found that, in most compartments, the standard k − ϵ model generally yielded reasonable agreement with the experimental results as compared to RNG k − ϵ and realizable k − ϵ models; however, for probes P7 and P12, better trend was captured by RNG k − ϵ and realizable k − ϵ models, respectively.