Relationship between self-priming and hydraulic behavior in venturi scrubber

Horiguchi, Naoki; Yoshida, Hiroyuki  ; Kaneko, Akiko*; Abe, Yutaka*

As revealed by Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, countermeasures against severe accident in nuclear power plants are an urgent need. In particular, from the viewpoint of protecting containment and suppressing the diffusion of radioactive materials, it is important to develop a device which allows filtered venting of contaminated high pressure gas. In the filtered venting system that used in European reactors, so called Multi Venturi Scrubbers System is used to realize filtered venting without any power supply. This system is able to define to be composed of Venturi Scrubbers (VS) and a bubble column. In the VS, scrubbing of the contaminated gas is promoted by both gas releases through a submerged VS and gas-liquid contact with splay flow formed by liquid suctioned through a hole provided in the throat part of the VS. This type of VS is called self-priming ones. However, the mechanism of the self-priming VS are understood insufficiently in the previous studies. In this study, to understand operation characteristics of the VS for filtered venting, we discussed the mechanisms of self-priming phenomena and hydraulic behavior in the VS. In this paper, we conduct visualized observation of the hydraulic behavior in the VS and measure the liquid flow rate in the VS for understanding self-priming. As results, it is shown that the possibility that the VS decontamination performance falls low level with no self-priming.