Evaluation of sodium pool fire and thermal consequence in two-cell configuration

Abstract

Evaluation of accidental sodium leak, combustion, and its thermal consequence is one of the important issues to be assessed in the field of sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR). The present paper deals with the sodium pool fire and subsequent heat transfer behavior in air atmosphere two-cell geometry both experimentally and analytically because such two-cell configuration is considered as a typical one to possess important characteristic of multi-compartment system seen in an actual plant. The analyses of the experimental data clarify the basic characteristics of sodium pool combustion and consequential heat and mass transfer in the cells, for instance, suggesting several features of multidimensional thermal-hydraulic behaviors such as the strong gas mixture at the combustion cell and the thermal stratification near the opening between the two cells. As a result of the numerical analysis using a lumped-parameter based zonal model safety analysis code ‘SPHINCS’, the applicability of the ventilation model implemented in SPHINCS has been demonstrated. It is also investigated that the buoyancy- driven ventilation is dominant in the experiment.

Keywords

• sodium cooled fast reactor
• sodium fire
• thermal-hydraulics
• sphincs
• computational simulation