Mixing Study in an Unbaffled Stirred Precipitator Using LES Modelling

This paper describes the CFD modelling of a reactor operating in the nuclear industry using LES approach. The reactor consists of an unbaffled stirred tank reactor in which plutonium precipitation reactions are carried out. The flow generated in such a precipitator is complex and there is very little information available in the literature about unbaffled reactors stirred with magnetic rod. That is why a hydrodynamic modelling has been developed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in order to get accurate description of mixing phenomena inside the precipitator and therefore to be able to predict the solid particle properties. Due to the strong turbulence anisotropy, the turbulence transport simulation is achieved by a large eddy simulation (LES) approach which gives unsteady solutions. The numerical simulations are performed in 3D using the Trio_U code developed at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique. The predictive performances of the modelling are analysed through a mixing phenomena study. Both experimental and numerical studies are performed. This work shows how hydrodynamics inside the reactor can have a noticeable effect on the precipitate properties and how LES modelling is a very effective tool for the process control.