Natural convection in a uniformly heated pool

In the event of a core meltdown accident, to prevent reactor vessel failure from molten corium relocation to the reactor vessel lower head, the establishment of a coolable configuration has been proposed by flooding with water the reactor cavity. In Reference 3, it was shown that for the heavy-water new production reactor (NPW-HWR) design, this strategy, e.g., the rejection of decay heat to a containment decay heat removal system by boiling of water in the reactor cavity, could keep the reactor vessel temperature below failure limits. The analysis of Ref. 3 was performed with the computer code COMMIX-1AR/P, and showed that natural convection in the molten-corium pool was the dominant mechanism of heat transfer from the pool to the wall of the reactor vessel lower head. To determine whether COMMIX adequately predicts natural convection in a pool heated by a uniform heat source, in Ref. 4, the experiments of free convection in a semicircular cavity of Jahn and Reineke were analyzed with COMMIX. It was found that the Nusselt (Nu) number predicted by COMMIX was within the spread of the experimental measurements. In the COMMIX analysis of Ref. 4, the semicircular cavity was treated as symmetric. The objective of the work presented in this paper was to extend the COMMIX validation analysis of Ref. 4 by removing the assumption of symmetry and expanding the analysis up to the highest Rayleigh (Ra) number that leads to a steady state. In conclusion, this work shows that the numerical predictions of natural convection in an internally heated pool bounded by a curved bottom are in reasonably good agreement with experimental measurements.