Aerosol Formation from High-Pressure Sprays for Supporting the Safety Analysis for the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant
The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at Hanford is being designed and built to pretreat and vitrify waste currently stored in underground tanks at Hanford. One of the postulated events in the hazard analysis for the WTP is a breach in process piping that produces a pressurized spray with small droplets that can be transported into ventilation systems. Literature correlations are currently used for estimating the generation rate and size distribution of aerosol droplets in postulated spray releases. These correlations, however, are based on results obtained from small engineered nozzles using Newtonian liquids that do not contain slurry particles and thus do not accurately represent the fluids and breaches in the WTP. A test program was developed to measure the generation rate of droplets suspended in a test chamber and droplet size distribution from a range of prototypic sprays. A novel test method was developed to allow measurement of sprays from small to very large breaches and also includes the effect of aerosol generation from splatter when the spray impacts on walls. Results show that the aerosol generation rate increases with increasing the orifice area, though with a weaker dependence on orifice area than the currently-used correlation. A comparison of water sprays to slurry sprays with 8 to 20 wt% gibbsite or boehmite particles shows that the presence of slurry particles depresses the release fraction compared to water for droplets above 10 μm and increases the release fraction below this droplet size.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1148630
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-92454; 830403000
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM 2013: Waste Management Conference: International Collaboration and Continuous Improvement, February 24-28, 2013, Phoenix, Arizona, Paper No. WM-13183
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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