Unsteady Natural Convection in a Cylindrical Containment Vessel (CIGMA) With External Wall Cooling: Numerical CFD Simulation

In the case of a severe accident, natural convection plays an important role in the atmosphere mixing of nuclear reactor containments. In this case, the natural convection might not in the steady-state condition. Hence, instead of steady-state simulation, the transient simulation should be performed to understand natural convection in the accident scenario within a nuclear reactor containment. The present study, therefore, was aimed at the transient 3-D numerical simulations of natural convection of air around a cylindrical containment with unsteady thermal boundary conditions (BCs) at the vessel wall. For this purpose, the experiment series was done in the CIGMA facility at Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). The upper vessel or both the upper vessel and the middle jacket was cooled by subcooled water, while the lower vessel was thermally insulated. A 3-D model was simulated with OpenFOAM(R), applying the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (URANS) model. Different turbulence models were studied, such as the standard k-epsilon, standard k-omega, k-omega shear stress transport (SST), and low-Reynolds-k-epsilon Launder-Sharma. The results of the four turbulence models were compared versus the results of experimental data. The k-omega SST showed a better prediction compared to other turbulence models. Additionally, the accuracy of the predicted temperature and pressure were improved when the heat conduction on the internal structure, i.e., flat bar, was considered in the simulation. Otherwise, the predictions on both temperature and pressure were underestimated compared with the experimental results. Hence, the conjugate heat transfer in the internal structure inside the containment vessel must be modeled accurately.