Surface Vortex Simulation at Selected Water Temperatures

Abstract

Circulating water systems (CW) and safety water systems (SW) in various power plants use vertical pumps to pump water from pump intakes. A properly designed pump intake structure prevents the occurrence of strong surface vortices, which might inhibit the proper functioning of the pump. Although several standards for experimental testing of pump intake structure suitability exist, our goal is to find a way to predict such vortices numerically, from a single-phase simulation. In such a process, we had already eliminated some of the turbulence models. In the current paper we confirm that Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) turbulence model with the curvature correction (CC) factor applied is well suited for such flows. By using a methodology for determining the vortex air core length, the SAS-CC turbulence model results were compared to the experimental data for two selected temperatures. The results show better agreement than the laminar simulations in terms of higher mean value accuracy and lower scattering.