Study of Stable Stratification in HiRJET Facility With Direct Numerical Simulation

Stable density stratification in a large enclosure could significantly hamper the effectiveness of natural convection cooling in pool-type liquid metal or gas-cooled advanced reactors. In addition, accurate prediction of stratified front behavior remains to be a challenging task for turbulence modeling. With the rapid growth of high-performance-computing capabilities in recent years, conducting high-fidelity simulations for a large-timescale transient has become more affordable and hence a valuable data source to support turbulence modeling as well as to gain further physical insights. In this work, direct numerical simulation is performed at experiment-consistent conditions to simulate the density stratification transient High-Resolution Jet (HiRJET) facility. Specifically, we focus on the case where an injected aqueous sugar solution has 1.5% density higher than that in the enclosure. In the early stage of the transient, the impingement of the denser jet to the bottom surface of the enclosure promoted turbulent mixing locally. This rendered the establishment of the mixture layer, formation and swift upward propagation of the stratified front, and elevation with (locally) the highest vertical concentration gradient. As the front rose, the diminishing turbulent mass flux slowed down the propagation, and a larger vertical concentration gradient was established. In this stage, both the velocity and the concentration scalar showed large-timescale fluctuation behavior around the stratified front. For the concentration time signal, the characteristic frequency in the power spectral density was found to agree well with the Brunt-Vaisalla frequency. The preliminary validation endeavor showed that the stratified front location and the corresponding concentration gradient magnitude in the simulation agreed well with the experiment data. Further validation will mainly revolve around benchmarking against high-resolution density measurement and high-order flow statistics.