Study on fragmentation behavior of liquid lead alloy droplet in water

Fragmentation behavior of molten lead alloys droplet in water was investigated experimentally by releasing liquid LBE (45w%Pb-55w%Bi) and lead droplets into a pool of subcooled water. The fragmentation occurred when the temperature of the interface between a molten droplet and water was higher than the spontaneous nucleation temperature of water and lower than the minimum film boiling temperature. With increasing the droplet temperatures, the peak pressure in fragmentation of LBE droplet increased from 5 to 8 kPa, and for lead, the value remained around 2 kPa. With increasing the water subcooling, the peak pressure in fragmentation remained constant at 5 kPa for LBE droplet and at 2 kPa for lead droplet. The lead alloy fragmentation process in water was numerically simulated by embedding a semi-empirical fragmentation model for droplet fragmentation rate into the computer code of two-phase flow: JASMINE code. The corresponding results, such as pressure history and fragmentation peak pressure, agreed well with the experimental results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.