Assessment of CFD Methods in Simulating Flowfield in a Vane-Type Separator

Abstract The vane-type separator is an important device to remove the fission gas from molten fuel in Molten salt reactor. To better understanding its working mechanism and provide a reliable reference for its practical application, numerical study was carried out in this paper. Due to the centrifugal force, the transition of flow pattern happens, leading to the change in interface structure. Before bunching to the gas core, the scale of interface is less than millimeter, while for the scale of interface between gas core and continuous phase is much larger than that. Because of this multi-scale interface phenomenon, it is important to assess the CFD models to obtain a high-fidelity result. Therefore, two multiphase models were compared. One is the Euler-Euler method and another is a hybrid approach of Euler-Euler and Volume of Fraction methods. Besides, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was used to capture the turbulence information of the flowfield. The result shows that a sharper interface between gas core and liquid is able to simulate using the hybrid method because of the introduction of the transportation equation of volume fraction.