Transient Multicomponent Mixture Analysis Based on an ICE Numerical Technique for the Simulation of an Air Ingress Accident in an HTGR

Abstract

This paper presents a transient multicomponent mixture analysis tool developed to analyze the molecular diffusion, natural convection, and chemical reactions related to air ingress phenomena that occur during a primary-pipe rupture of a high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HIGR). The present analysis tool solves the one-dimensional basic equations for continuity, momentum, energy of the gas mixture, and the mass of each gas species. In order to obtain numerically stable and fast computations, the implicit continuous Eulerian scheme is adopted to solve the governing equations in a strongly coupled manner. Two types of benchmark calculations were performed with the data of prerious Japanese inverse U-tube experiments. The analysis program, based on the ICE technique, runs about 36 times faster than the FLUENT6 for the simulation of the two experiments. The calculation results are within a 10% deviation from the experimental data regarding the concentrations of the gas species and the onset times of natural convection.