Hydrogen mixing and distribution in a nuclear power plant containment during a postulated severe accident is a phenomenon with high safety relevance for current and advanced light water reactors. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) SESAR Thermal-Hydraulics (SETH) project was carried out to generate experimental data on basic containment phenomena with the required instrumentation to assess computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and lumped parameter codes.

In this paper, we analyze the PANDA SETH Test 16 of the OECD/NEA SETH project using containmentFOAM, which is a tailored open-source CFD code package for containment analysis developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH based on OpenFOAM.® SETH Test 16 addressed steam-air mixture transport driven by jets and plumes in the multicompartment PANDA facility (two vessels and an interconnecting pipe) at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland. Steam as a wall plume was injected at 0.040 kg/s and 140°C in vessel 1, which was initially filled with dry air at 108°C. The steam-air mixture was vented out from the top of vessel 2. The system pressure was constant at 1.3 bar for the whole test duration (4000 s).

To simulate SETH Test 16, the k-ω shear stress transport turbulence model was adopted with the generalized gradient diffusive hypothesis buoyancy turbulence model. The simulation represented the experimental phenomenology reasonably well. The trends for the calculated temperature distribution were similar to those of the experiments and only yielded a slight discrepancy of about 2.7%. In addition, the distribution of the steam molar fraction was well predicted above the injection tube in vessel 1. However, below the injection tube in vessel 1, some discrepancies between the simulations and the experimental results were observed. These may have been caused by the higher turbulent mass diffusivity in the physical model and the challenge of the mesh resolution in the middle region of vessel 1.