Experimental and analytical study on aerosol behavior in WIND project Original Research Article

The tests on fission product (FP) behavior in piping under severe accidents are being conducted in the wide range piping integrity demonstration (WIND) project at JAERI to investigate the piping integrity which may be threatened by decay heat from deposited FPs. In order to obtain the background information for future WIND experiment and to confirm analytical capabilities of the FP aerosol analysis codes, ART and VICTORIA, the FP behavior in safety relief valve (SRV) line of BWR during TQUX sequence was analyzed. The analyses showed that the mechanisms that control the FP deposition and transport agreed well between the two codes. However, the differences in models such as diffusiophoresis or turbulence, the treatment of chemical forms and aerosol mass distribution could affect the deposition in piping and, consequently, on the source terms. The WIND experimental analyses were also conducted with a three-dimensional fluiddynamic WINDFLOW, ART and an interface module to appropriately couple the fluiddynamics and FP behavior analyses. The analyses showed that the major deposition mechanism for cesium iodide (CsI) is thermophoresis which depends on the thermal gradient in gas. Accordingly, the coupling analyses were found to be essential to accurately predict the CsI deposition in piping, to which little attention has been paid in the previous studies.