Abstract
Investigations in the area of two-phase flow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) facility are progressing. It is expected that the target vessel lifetime could be extended by introducing gas into the liquid mercury target. As part of an effort to validate the two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, simulations and experiments of gas injection in stagnant and flowing mercury have been completed. The volume of fluid (VOF) method as implemented in ANSYS-CFX, was used to simulate the unsteady two-phase flow of gas injection into stagnant mercury. Bubbles produced at the upwards-oriented vertical gas injector were measured with proton radiography at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The comparison of the CFD results to the radiographic images shows good agreement for bubble sizes and shapes at various stages of the bubble growth, detachment, and gravitational rise. Although several gas flows were measured, this paper focuses on the case with a gas flow rate of 8 cc/min through the 100-micron-diameter injector needle. The acoustic waves emitted due to the detachment of the bubble and during subsequent bubble oscillations were recorded with a microphone, providing a precise measurement of the bubble sizes. As the mercury flow rate increases, the drag force causes earlier bubble detachment and therefore smaller bubbles.
