TOPFLOW-PTS Air-Water Experiments on the Phase Separation in the ECC Nozzle and the ECC Water Mixing During PTS Scenarios

Abstract

In two-phase Pressurized Thermal Shock scenarios several thermal hydraulic phenomena, such as direct contact condensation, entrainment of steam bubbles and multi-scale momentum transfer are involved. The TOPFLOW-PTS experimental assembly represents a 1:2.5 scaled model of a PWR downcomer, cold leg with emergency core cooling injection and a pump simulator. It is build up for the development and validation of CFD models. The setup is highly instrumented – a large number of thermocouples, an infrared and a high-speed camera as well as wire mesh sensors are used to obtain CFD-grade data. As a first step air-water experiments were done with the special aim to investigate the behaviour of the liquid jet from the ECC injection into the cold leg. They indicated that the jet momentum at the impact position is very important for the mixing process and stratification inside the ECC nozzle needs to be considered in CFD calculations.