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The steam-water separator is the core component of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) steam generator, and its performance has a direct impact on the safety and economy of a nuclear power plant. This paper presents a systematic review of the numerical simulation methods for steam-water separators. It is shown that the Euler-Lagrange model is suitable for sparse droplet trajectory tracking, with low computational cost, but ignores the inter-phase coupling effect; the Euler-Euler two-fluid model can efficiently simulate inter-phase interactions in a complex flow field through the assumption of continuous medium; the Euler-DPM-EWF model can describe droplet-liquid film interactions in fine detail by combining discrete-phase tracking and liquid-film simulation and is suitable for analyses of liquid-film re-entrainment phenomena; and the Popu-lation Balance Model (PBM) can effectively predict the multi-scale droplet distribution and its aggregation/fragmentation process. Among the turbulence models, the Realizable k-ε model performs well in high strain rate flows, the RNG k-ε model is suitable for strong cyclonic fields, and the SST k-ω model is more robust in near-wall flows and free shear flows. In this paper, the Euler-DPM-EWF model is suggested to be coupled with the VOF method to extend the liquid film thickness simulation range, and the SST k-ω model is preferred to optimize the near-wall flow prediction.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.