Numerical Assessment of PANDA Experiments Covering Steam/Air/Helium Mixtures

Abstract

The accurate modeling of gas distribution (air, steam and Hydrogen) in a PWR containment, which are released after the beginning of a severe accident leading to the melting of the core, concerns phenomena such as wall condensation, hydrogen accumulation, gas stratification and transport in the different compartments of the containment. The paper presents numerical assessments of the test 25 of the PANDA experiment, using a homogeneous approach with the in-house CFD solver Code_Saturne. The paper is focused on the analysis and understanding of gas stratification and complex transport phenomena involved in such configurations.