Modeling crust fracture and water ingression through crust during top-flooding strategy for corium cooling

On water-ingression during top-flooding of corium melts

“…However, as they were observed in situations where the inertial frictions play an important role, one may, instead, relate them to Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities [23], that are induced by phase acceleration or by gravity. One may observe that Yeo & No [12], followed the qualitative observations of Ginsberg, considered in a parametric way that the generated steam was escaping from some dried channels, whereas water would penetrate through the fingers as a one-phase flow.…”

“…This is equivalent to multiplying the crack spacing by a fitting factor, as done by Yeo & No [12] (their factor ζ). The order of magnitude for this factor to accurately recover the experimental values is about 100.…”

“…Very recently, Yeo and No proposed a new and original detailed analytical 1D modeling and applied it to describe the SSWICS tests [12]. The model makes the same hypothesis as Nayak and colleagues of a sudden crack formation once for all along a given depth, without further progression.…”