| Abstract: | Because of the practical importance of two-phase flow instabilities, especially in boiling water nuclear reactor technology, substantial efforts have been made to date to understand the physical phenomena governing such instabilities and to develop computational tools to model the dynamics of marginally-stable/unstable boiling systems. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated methodology for the analysis of flow-induced instabilities in boiling channels and systems. The major novel aspects of the proposed approach are: (a) it is based on the combined frequency-domain and time-domain methods, the former used to quantify stability margins and to determine the onset of instability conditions, the latter to study the nonlinear system response outside the stability boundaries identified using the nearly-exact results of the frequency-domain analysis; (b) the two-fluid model of two-phase flow has been used for the first time to analytically derive the boiling channel transfer functions for the parallel-channel and channel-to-channel instability modes. In this way, the major characteristics of a boiling system, including the onset-of-instability conditions, can be readily evaluated by using the qualitative frequency-domain approach, whereas the explicit time-domain integration is performed, if necessary, only for the operating conditions that have already been identified as unstable. Both methods use the same physical two-fluid model that, in one case, is linearized and used to derive a rigorous analytical solution in the complex domain, and, in the other case, is solved numerically using an algorithm developed especially for this purpose. The results using both methods have been compared against each other and extensively tested. The testing and validation of the new model included comparisons of the predicted steady-state distributions of major parameters and of the transient channel response against experimental data. |
