CFD Modelling of Sodium Spray Combustion

Abstract

A sodium cooled fast reactor is one of the attractive concept for the IVth generation advanced reactor designs. For the safety of a sodium cooled fast reactor, sodium-air and sodium-water reactions must be avoided. A sodium-air reaction typically occurs in two dominant modes, namely the spray fire and pool fire. The focus of the paper will be on spray fires. To avoid sodium-air accidents and to mitigate the consequences if a sodium fire occurs, it is essential to understand all the physical phenomena involved in sodium spray combustion. Numerical modeling is one of the methods, which can be used to understand all the physics involved. The goal of the work presented in this paper is to propose a numerical method to simulate sodium spray combustion and to validate this method against experiments. Free falling single droplet sodium spray combustion experiments are used as a validation case for the proposed numerical method. The trend obtained using our numerical simulations matches well with the experimental data. Further validation needs to be performed, before the presented modeling can be used for sodium fast reactor safety analyses.