Application of Some Turbulence Models to Simulate Buoyancy-Driven Flow

Abstract

During a severe nuclear power plant (NPP) accident, large amounts of hydrogen and steam can be produced in nuclear reactor containment. In the case of hydrogen combustion, there is a possibility of producing short term pressure or detonation force. Therefore, these gas species’ production could threaten containment integrity. For instance, in the past, two gas explosion accidents occurred: In 1979 Three Mile Island and in 2011 Fukushima. After these accidents, modeling the gas behavior became an important topic in nuclear safety analyses. In order to predict hydrogen behavior and other gas species transport, mixing and combustion, reliable turbulence models need to be applied. In this work, standard k–ε, k–ω, RNG k–ε, Realizable k–ε and SST k–ω turbulence models are addressed. The computations are performed with HYDRAGON code. HYDRAGON code is a three-dimensional thermal-hydraulic code, developed to solve low-speed gas flow of compressible Navier-Stokes equations in cartesian or cylindrical coordinates or a mixture of the two coordinates. The goal of this work is to test the performance of these models by comparing the results to the benchmark. The code aims to predict containment thermal-hydraulic conditions during NPP accident.