The VULCANO VE-U7 Corium spreading benchmark

Validation of free-convective heat transfer analysis with JUPITER to evaluate air-cooling performance of fuel debris in dry method

“…All of those numerical analyses series are going to perform with JUPITER. In our previous works, JUPITER was validated for singe-phase flow, multi-phase flow, solid boundary in flow, solidification and those composite phenomena by comparing with benchmark tests and VULCANO (Journeau et al, 2006) experimental results (Yamashita et al, 2017a). Those comparisons proved that JUPITER results were in agreement with those benchmark tests and the VULCANO results.…”

Melt spreading code assessment, modifications, and application to the EPR core catcher design.

“…The underlying reason was the large calculated convective heat transfer losses to the substrate due to the low Prandtl number for these metallic fluids. Based on findings from earlier work, 18,[30][31][32] this shortcoming was addressed by adding the ability to model an interfacial heat transfer resistance between melt and substrate, with the heat transfer resistance is left as a user-defined input constant. With this change, the new problem was how to best fit the model to the dataset given the fact that the interfacial heat transfer resistance, h R , constituted a second independent variable to adjust in the analysis.…”

“…Isothermal tests (6 cases 2,10 ) 3. Flow and freezing tests (28 cases); i.e., core oxides (7 tests [16][17][18][19][20][21] ), core oxide -steel mixtures (4 tests [20][21] ), simulant oxides (12 tests [11][12][13][14][15] ), and steel alone (5 tests 9,[12][13] The category of flow and freezing tests include five cases in which water was present in the cavity. Spreading on concrete, ceramic, and steel substrates has been investigated.…”

“…Another key improvement in the area of material properties was providing the ability to input a tabular function for the oxide phase solid fraction variation between the liquidus and solidus temperatures. The original version of the code assumed that the solid fraction varied linearly in this range, but research since then has shown that the functional dependence is highly non-linear for multi-component oxide melts (e.g., see Journeau et al 18 ). Since solid fraction has an important effect on viscosity which, in turn, strongly affects spreading behavior, this was one of the key modeling improvements in the area of material properties evaluation.…”

“…This is important in terms of calculating spreading behavior for metallic melts, for which shrinkage at the melt -substrate interface can have a marked effect on local heat transfer rate. 18,[30][31][32] Finally, of the thermo-physical properties affecting spreading, viscosity is the most important. 17 The initial code version used the Ishii-Zuber 33 correlation to account for the effects of solids buildup in the melt on increasing corium viscosity.…”