Preliminary experiments with an underexpanded gas jet into water

Uchida, Mitsunori*; Someya, Satoshi*; Okamoto, Koji*; Ohshima, Hiroyuki

When a heat exchanger in a fast breeder reactor cracks, a sodium-water reaction occurs. When a tube cracks, highly pressurized water or steam escapes into the surrounding liquid sodium. The release of steam into the liquid sodium media is a two-phase flow with an underexpansion. There have been few reports on the underexpansion of the gas-liquid phase. In this paper, qualitative measurement of the two-phase flow was carried out for the purpose of revealing the flow with the underexpanded gas jet injected into water. The gas jet range and the gas jet width were then obtained from averaged images of a high-speed camera. PIV was also carried out by observing scattering light from the gas bubbles. The gas jet range and the gas jet width increased approximately linearly with increasing pressure. The results of PIV showed that the bubble velocity increased increasing pressure.