The importance of representative aerosol diameter and bubble size distribution in pool scrubbing

Abstract

Mitigation methods that reduce the amount of radioactive materials leaking into the environment have emerged as a critical issue. Many researchers have found that pool scrubbing can play a crucial role in this process. Pool scrubbing is a practice that removes radioactive aerosols using pool water when a gas containing aerosols rises in a pool. Several codes have been developed to evaluate how much aerosol is removed during the pool scrubbing process. This study aims to improve the pool scrubbing code in a bubbly flow to make it more realistic. The importance of selecting a representative diameter of aerosol particles with a lognormal distribution is discussed. Moreover, unlike the BUSCA (BUbble SCrubbing Algorithm) code and the SPARC (Suppression Pool Aerosol Removal Code) code, which do not account for the condensation effect of the steam in the injection region or for thermophoresis, respectively, the presented code, called POSCAR (POol SCrubbing Aerosol Removal code), takes these two phenomena into account. Additionally, the calculation is performed considering the aerosol removal effect with the lognormal bubble size distribution, which had not been considered in the two aforementioned codes. Finally, the performance of this code is evaluated based on experimental results to further improve existing codes. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.