Development of numerical simulation method of natural convection around heated porous medium by using JUPITER

Uesawa, Shinichiro  ; Yamashita, Susumu   ; Shibata, Mitsuhiko ; Yoshida, Hiroyuki  

For contaminated water management in decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Stations, reduction in water injection, intermittent injection water and air cooling are considered. However, since there are uncertainties of fuel debris in the PCV, it is necessary to examine and evaluate optimal cooling methods according to the distribution state of the fuel debris and the progress of the fuel debris retrieval work in advance. We have developed a method for estimating the thermal behavior in the air cooling, including the influence of the position, heat generation and the porosity of fuel debris. Since a large-scale thermal-hydraulics analysis of natural convection is necessary for the method, JUPITER developed independently by JAEA is used. It is however difficult to perform the large-scale thermal-hydraulics analysis with JUPITER by modeling the internal structure of the debris which may consist of a porous medium. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the heat transfer of the porous medium by adding porous models to JUPITER. In this study, we report the validation of JUPITER applied the porous model and discuss which heat transfer models are most effective in porous models such as series, parallel and geometric mean models. To obtain validation data of JUPITER for the natural convective heat transfer analysis around the porous medium, we performed the heat transfer and the flow visualization experiments of the natural convection in the experimental system including the porous medium. In the comparison between the experiment and the numerical analysis with each model, the numerical result with the geometric mean model was the closest of the models to the experimental results. However, the numerical results of the temperature and the velocity were overestimated for those experimental results. In particular, the temperature near the interface between the porous medium and air was more overestimated.