In this paper, the unsteady pressure field and head-drop phenomenon caused by one of the most dangerous accidents in reactor plants known as Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA) in its worse condition called small LOCA have been investigated numerically by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in a nuclear reactor cooling pump. Five computational models with different blades had been calculated using Eulerian-Eulerian two fluid models using a multiphase approach. Simulation results show increasing gas volume fraction results in a sharp decline of the head pressure and pump efficiencies for each of 5 kinds of pumps modeled. This is especially evident for both the head pressure of impeller types C and impeller E. Here only have operating at half (58m and 54.9m) of the design condition when the gas volume fraction is 25%. The analysis of inner flow field of the five model pumps shown that the lower pressure area appeared at the inlet and outlet of the impeller as well as a small part distribution at the inlet of the diffuser, which is the main reason made the gas bubbles tend to concentrate at the impeller eye on the suction surface, the distribution of two phases appeared by non-linear increase and random located in whole passages. The experimental and simulation results are compared and are in good agreement with values obtained for the global performance at lower gas contents (below20%). When the gas contents increases to 25%, the bubbles occupy the passages, which effectively causes unsteady flow in the gas phase cannot be neglected for accurately predicting the inner flow of the pump. These results imply that this numerical method is suitable for the two-phase flow under certain gas contents (below 20%) in the reactor cooling pump.
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