Prediction of polydisperse steam bubble condensation in sub-cooled water using the Inhomogeneous MUSIG model

The aim of this paper is to present the validation of a new methodology implemented in ANSYS CFX (ANSYS, 2009), that extends the standard capabilities of the inhomogeneous MUltiple-SIze Group model (MUSIG) by additionally accounting for bubble size changes due to heat and mass transfer. Bubble condensation plays an important role in sub-cooled boiling or steam injection into pools among many other applications of interest in the Nuclear Reactor Safety (NRS) area and other engineering areas. Since the mass transfer rate between phases is proportional to the interfacial area density, a polydisperse modelling approach considering different bubble sizes is of main importance, because an accurate prediction of the bubble diameter distribution is required.
The standard MUSIG approach is an inhomogeneous one with respect to bubble velocities, which combines the size classes into different so-called velocity groups to precisely capture the different behaviour of the bubbles depending on their size. In the framework of collaboration between ANSYS and the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) an extension of the MUSIG model was developed, which allows to take into account the effect of mass transfer due to evaporation and condensation on the bubble size distribution changes in addition to breakup and coalescence effects.
After the successful verification of the model, the next step was the validation of the new developed model against experimental data. For this purpose an experiment was chosen, which was investigated in detail at the TOPFLOW test facility at FZD. It consists of a steam bubble condensation case at 2MPa pressure in 3.9K sub-cooled water at a large diameter (DN200) vertical pipe. Sub-cooled water flows into the 195.3 mm wide and 8 m height pipe, were steam is injected at z=0.0 m and is recondensing. The experimental results are published in (Lucas, et al., 2007). Using a wire-mesh sensor technique the main characteristics of the two-phase flow were measured, i.e. radial steam volume fraction distribution and bubble
diameter distribution at different heights and cross-sections.
ANSYS CFX 12.0 was used for the numerical prediction. A 60 degrees pipe sector was modelled in order to save computational time, discretized into a mesh containing about 260.000 elements refined towards the pipe wall and towards the location of the steam injection nozzles. Interfacial forces due to drag, lift, turbulent dispersion and wall lubrication force were considered. The numerical results were compared to the experimental data. The agreement is highly satisfactory, proving the capability of the new MUSIG model extension to accurately predict such complex two-phase flow.