Estimation of the radioactive aerosols capture in accidental sequences of nuclear power plants

Resumen

The turbulent submerged jets can be found fairly frequently in a great variety of processes, their study is essential in many industrial processes and engineering applications, such as in underwater propulsion, in metallurgical processes, in chemical processes or in the nuclear industry, among others. Within the nuclear world the submerged jets can occur in light water reactors (LWR), in both pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and boiling water reactors (BWR). These submerged jets are usually associated with complex multiphase flows, so that all processes occurring after such injection will be essentially unstable and turbulent. A hypothetical severe accident in a reactor can cause deterioration of the core, so that the fission products can escape from the core and be transported through the primary system and, finally, can be released to the surrounding environment. But if there is a volume of water in the escape pathway of aerosols, a discharge in the shape of submerged jet can occur, whether in a suppression pool (during an accident with loss of power, SBO, in a water reactor boiling BWR) or in the secondary of a steam generator (in an accidental breakage sequence tube / s in U in a steam generator, SGTR, in a pressurized water reactor, PWR). So that there is a capture of aerosols in those volumes, being reduced the amount of them that escape outside. Usually these sequences have been considered only for BWRs and for low discharge velocities, but these may also take place at higher velocities and, as mentioned previously, in PWRs. Throughout this thesis there is a contribution to a better understanding and quantification of natural mitigation processes that occur when a jet is discharged into a volume of water, so that it can be applied to discharges in suppression pools in a SBO sequence (BWRs), and inside of a steam generator during a SGTR event (PWRs). Being the central activity the expansion of SPARC90 code capabilities, so as to be able to quantify the aerosol capture that occurs when the discharge takes place at high velocity (originally the code only was developed to study discharges under globular regime, i.e., injection at low velocity). So the process followed to carry out this work can be divided into several stages. The first one focuses on the literature search for available information, in a specific way on submerged jets and, given the scarce specific information, this has been extended to the literature search of processes with phenomenologies that present analogies with submerged jets. Within this part, it has on the one hand, finding aspects of jet hydrodynamics and on the other, those related to aerosol capture processes. In a second stage, there are aspects of the implementation into the new code subroutines of the expressions found and / or developed in the previous stage. While for the third stage, remains the assessment of the capabilities and behavior of the new models implemented in the code. For this last stage, first, it has been proceeded to conduct a verification process which has been tested the code robustness. And secondly, it has been proceeded to perform a validation process, which has been carried out through the comparison of the results predicted by the code against the limited experimental data that are available under similar conditions to those of the model. Being the comparison against the experimental data satisfactory, showing a marked improvement in the code capabilities.