Some nuclear reactor safety related aspects of plunging jets

Plunging jets play an important role in nuclear reactor safety research. In the present paper the case of the strainer clogging issue is considered. Entrained air caused by a plunging jet has an influence of the liquid flow field and on the fibre transport in the sump. In the paper the amount of entrained air is given as an inlet boundary condition according to correlations in the literature and confirmed by own experiments. The influence of entrained air on the fibre deposition pattern at the bottom of a tank and on the mixing procedure for the case of temperature differences between jet and tank water are investigated by CFD calculations and compared to experiments.
The presented work is part of a joint research project performed in cooperation between the University of Applied Science Zittau/Görlitz and Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. The project deals with the experimental investigation of particle transport phenomena in coolant flow in Zittau and the development of CFD models for its simulation in Rossendorf (Krepper et al. 2008).