A Comparative CFD exercise on bubble hydrodynamics using Euler-Euler and interface tracking approaches

Dehbi, A.*; Cheng, X.*; Liao, Y.*; 岡垣 百合亜; Pellegrini, M.*

Proceedings of 19th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-19) (Internet), 15 Pages, 2022/03

Nuclear degraded cores produce fission product aerosols that may reach the environment if not removed by natural processes and/or filtering equipment. The transport paths of aerosols usually include transits through stagnant water pools. It is therefore essential to develop computational tools to predict the aerosols retention by water pools. Currently, this is mostly done with 1-D lumped-parameter codes that are too simplistic to capture the physics. It is hence worthwhile to attempt the CFD approach, which has recently become reasonably mature to address bubble hydrodynamics in low momentum two-phase flows. In this first comparative exercise, we restrict the investigation to a hypothetical parallelepiped water pool (228 cm) into which air is injected through a circular 4 mm ID orifice at low velocity of 0.2 m/s. We present predictions of the gas phase dynamics (void and velocity profiles) for both Euler-Euler and Interface Tracking (IT, Volume-of-Fluid (VOF)) methodologies. In addition, we compare bubble shape, volume and detachment frequency from various IT simulation codes (CFX, Fluent, Star-CCM+, OpenFOAM). Reasonable agreement is found between IT simulations near the injector, but discrepancies increase as one moves towards the free surface. The disagreement between the Euler-Euler and IT results is substantial throughout the domain. Future studies will consist of validation exercises against experimental data to highlight potential model deficiencies and point to ways of remedying them.