The control of hydrogen in the containment is an important safety issue in NPPs during a loss of coolant accident, because the dynamic pressure loads from hydrogen combustion can be detrimental to the structural integrity of the reactor safety systems and the reactor containment. In Sathiah et al. (2012b), we presented a computational fluid dynamics based method to assess the consequence of the combustion of uniform hydrogen air mixtures. In the present article, the extension of this method to and its validation for non-uniform hydrogen air mixture is described. The method is implemented in the CFD software ANSYS FLUENT using user defined functions. The extended code is validated against non-uniform hydrogen air experiments in the ENACCEF facility.
It is concluded that the maximum pressure and intermediate peak pressure were predicted within 12% and 18% accuracy. The eigen frequencies of the residual pressure wave phenomena were predicted within 4%. It is overall concluded that the current model predicts the considered ENACCEF experiments well. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.