Abstract
As part of the development of a flow-induced vibration evaluation methodology for the primary cooling piping in Japan sodium-cooled fast reactor, important factors were discussed in evaluating the flow-induced vibration for the hot-leg piping. To investigate a complex flow near the inlet of the hot-leg piping, a steady-state numerical analysis was carried out for the reactor upper plenum flow, which was simulated in a 1/10-scale reactor upper plenum experiment. Based on this analysis, experimental conditions on swirl inflow and deflected inflow that were identified as important factors were determined for flow-induced vibration experiments simulating only the hot-leg piping. In this study, the effect of the swirl inflow on flow pattern and pressure fluctuation onto the pipe wall was investigated in a 1/3-scale hot-leg pipe experiment. The experiment has indicated less significant for the pressure fluctuations, while the flow separation region was slightly influenced by the swirl inflow. Computational fluid dynamics simulation with a U-RANS approach results also appear in this paper. Through the simulations under the swirl inflow conditions of 0% and 5%, the validity of the U-RANS simulation was confirmed by comparison to the 1/3-scale hot-leg piping experiments.
