Hydrogen leaking in a nuclear containment (PANDA)

Researchers : Eunbeom Jung, Jungwoo Kim (in collaboration with SNUST)

Motivation & Objectives

    - During a severe accident in a nuclear power plant, hydrogen which is generated in the containment play an important role on the safety of the plant.

    - Therefore hydrogen leaking in a nuclear power plant is an important subject because hydrogen is accumulated.

    - Especially, a mole fraction of hydrogen is a key variable because when it reaches a flammable limit of hydrogen, it can be exploded.

    - To avoid an accident, a temporal evolution of hydrogen dispersion in the containment should be predicted accurately and a behavior of hydrogen in the containment should be investigated.

    - Due to a flammable property of hydrogen, however, it is not easy to experiment the leakage in real world. On the other hand, using simulation, the investigation can be done more safely.

    - Therefore the object of this research is to accurately predict the hydrogen dispersion and investigate the behavior of hydrogen in the containment by using a simulation.

    - To exactly simulate a hydrogen leakage in the PANDA containment, large eddy simulation(LES), high-order discretization methods, immersed boundary(IB) method and etc were used.

< Shape of the containment, PANDA >

< Test configuration >        

< Streamwise velocities of the simulation and previous study >

< Time traces of helium mole fractions at several locations >

< Growth of detonable region over time >

< Instantaneous density contour of helium-air mixture at t=50 sec>

Flow fields

< Mole fraction of helium >

< Streamwise velocity >