ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Nuclear Safety
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnuen.2025.1617991
This article is part of the Research TopicNuclear Reactor Safety and Accident Mitigation ManagementView all 5 articles
Study on deposition and resuspension phase of aerosol particles in straight test pipe
Provisionally accepted
Manish Kumar1,2*
Manish Joshi3
Anubhav Kumar Dwivedi2,4
Sidyant Kumar2,5,6T Saud2
Arshad Khan3Gaurav Mishra2,7Nandan Saha3Sunil Ganju8
Sachchida Nand Tripathi6
Balwinder K Sapra3- 1Warana University, Warananagar, India
- 2National Aerosol Facility, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur, India
- 3Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
- 4University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- 5Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India
- 6Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
- 7Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France
- 8Department of Atomic Energy, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
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Study of transport and deposition characteristics of aerosol particles in test sections is component of probabilistic safety assessment of nuclear reactors under severe accident scenarios. The deposited particles may get resuspended under favourable conditions thus affecting the source term estimates. The objective of the present work is to perform experiments in a straight test pipe section of length 4 meter under deposition and resuspension phase. Zinc oxide metal particles generated from Plasma Torch Aerosol Generator (PTAG) have been used as the test aerosols. Deposition phase experiments have been performed at a total carrier gas flow rate of 180 Lmin-1 whereas the flow has been increased to 1265 Lmin-1 for the resuspension phase. Thermophoresis as an effect of PTAG enthalpy governed temperature gradients was seen to be dominating the deposition phase. The effect of varying Reynold number in different volume sections could be seen to be reflected in higher 'resuspended to deposited mass ratio' in downstream direction. For the resuspension time of twenty minutes, profile of deposited and resuspended masses has been interpreted. Experimentally obtained characteristics have also been compared with numerical results from simulations performed with SOPHAEROS module of the Accidental Source Term Evaluation Code (ASTEC). This study performed in National Aerosol Facility (NAF), Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India embarks on the need of more research on aerosol resuspension effects as it impacts the accuracy of estimation of the source term.
Keywords: ASTEC, deposition, Metal aerosol, Plasma torch aerosol generator, resuspension
Received: 25 Apr 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kumar, Joshi, Dwivedi, Kumar, Saud, Khan, Mishra, Saha, Ganju, Tripathi and Sapra. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Manish Kumar, Warana University, Warananagar, India
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