A sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) is now under development in Japan. A shell-and-tube type once-through heat exchanger is to be installed to generate steam in the design. Low-pressure hot sodium flows in the shell side and high-pressure water, which heated to become steam, flows in the tube side. It has been anticipated that a pin hole is formed on the tube wall and high-pressure steam blows out from the hole. When a high-pressure steam flows out from the tube hole, a high-speed steam jet is formed in the sodium coolant. Fine sodium droplets are torn off from the sodium surface and entrained into the steam jet. Sodium-water chemical reaction causes an increase of entrained droplet temperature. The hot and high-speed sodium entrained droplets attack the wall of a neighboring tube and cause a wastage on the tube wall, which may lead to a failure propagation.
In Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), an analysis code for the sodium-water reaction phenomenon, called SERAPHIM, has already been developed. Visualization data is required to validate the liquid entrainment model in this code. Since the flow velocity at the gas leakage is a sonic speed, it is extremely difficult to visualize the inside of the gas jet. Experiments have been carried out to visualize this phenomenon in the past; however, experimental data for model validation has not been entirely obtained due to the above-mentioned difficulty. Thus, the motivation of this study is to examine the possibility of visualization method and to clarify flow structure.
To this end, we first performed the preliminary experiments using simple test facilities. Two types of test sections were used in the experiments: three-dimensional one and two-dimensional one. In the experiment using the three-dimensional one, we tried to visualize a more realistic phenomenon. Through this experiment, the whole gas-jet behavior was clearly captured. However, we found that the detailed droplet-entrainment behavior in a gas jet could not be obtained in this setup, especially at high-velocity conditions. Then, we carried out the experiments using the two-dimensional one. In these experiments, the flow structure of a gas jet was simplified. However, it was difficult to distinguish the liquid film formed on the wall surface of the test section from the entrained droplets. We considered that the liquid film is formed due to the nozzle outlet shape and improved the test section. By experiments with new test section, we succeeded in visualizing entrained droplets of relatively large diameter and calculated droplet diameter distribution. Then, we discussed the mechanism of entrained droplet behavior.