Coarse break-up of a stream of oxide and steel melt in a water pool (Contract research)

Moriyama, Kiyofumi; Maruyama, Yu ; Usami, Tsutomu*; Nakamura, Hideo  

A series of experiments on the break-up of high temperature oxide and steel melt jets in a water pool was conducted. The objective was to obtain data for the jet break-up length and size distribution of the droplets produced by the jet break-up, and information on the influence of material properties. Also, we tried to obtain additional information giving a clue to the mechanism governing the melt jet break-up, such as flow intensity of the steam column surrounding the melt jet, and its relation with the droplet size. In the experiments, zirconia-alumina mixture and stainless steel melt jets with diameter 17mm and velocity 7.8m/s at the water surface were dropped into a deep (2.1m) or shallow (0.6m) water pool with various subcool. From the results of the present experiments and also by referring other experimental data from literature, we obtained empirical correlation equations for the jet break-up length, the fraction of jet broken-up in a shallow pool where the jet was not completely broken-up, and the droplet size.