Effect of Bend Curvature Ratio on Flow Pattern at a Mixing Tee after a 90 Degree Bend

Many nuclear power plants report high cycle thermal fatigue in their cooling system, caused by temperature fluctuation in a non-isothermal mixing area. One of these areas is the T-junction, in which fluids of various temperatures and velocities blend. The objective of this research is to classify turbulent jet mechanics in order to examine the flow-field structure under various operating conditions. Furthermore, this research discovers the optimum operating conditions of the mixing tee in this piping system. An experimental model, including the T-junction with a 90 degree bend upstream, is operated to analyze this mixing phenomenon based on the real operation design of the Phenix Reactor. The temperature and velocity data show that a 90 degree bend has a strong effect on the fluid mixing mechanism and the momentum ratio between the main velocity and the branch velocity of the T-junction, which could be an important parameter for the classification of the fluid mixing mechanism. By comparing their mean velocity distributions, velocity fluctuations and time-series data, the behavior of the branch jet is categorized into four types of turbulent jets; sorted from the highest to the lowest momentum ratios, the jets are categorized as follows: the wall jet, the re-attached jet, the turn jet, and the impinging jet. Ultimately, the momentum ration of the turn jet was selected as the optimum operating condition as it has the lowest velocity and the lowest temperature fluctuations near the wall of the mixing tee. By changing the bending ratio from 1.41 to 1.0 the results show that most of data are in the turn jet region. Therefore, with the sharpened bend, the re-attached region is compressed.