Experimental Study on Natural Settling Characteristics of Aerosols in Containment

Abstract After a serious accident in the PWR nuclear power station, the radioactive aerosol will be released into the containment with the steam from the reactor core. Due to the huge volume of the containment itself, the mixture of steam, air and other gases and fission products may form complex thermal and hydraulic environments such as temperature stratification and aerosol stratification. At present, there is little research on the influence of various factors, such as pressure and vapour volume fraction, on aerosol sedimentation. Therefore, the evolution behavior of aerosol in the large space of containment needs to be further studied. In this study, the deposition behavior of aerosols in large-scale containment simulator (volume 127m3) was studied experimentally. The experiments were carried out under the conditions of different pressure and vapour volume fraction (including pure air). The multi-point position in the containment was measured with the help of particle size spectrometer and other equipment, and the key experimental data such as decay constant and concentration change were obtained.