The spontaneously condensing phenomena in a steam-jet pump and its influence on the numerical simulation accuracy

A wet steam model for transonic flow was proposed to investigate the flow behaviours in a steam-jet pump. Contrary to the general ideal gas assumption adopted by the most of the researches focusing on steam-jet pump investigation, the numerical simulation using this wet steam model that was implemented based on a commercial computational fluid dynamics code, and the simulation results demonstrated the existence of the spontaneous condensation as the supersonic flow passing through the nozzle. Our results also gave good agreement with the referenced experimental data, and with higher accuracy when comparing with the results generated from ideal gas modelling. The present study confirms that the simulation accuracy can be improved by the wet steam modelling, and gives a proper prediction of pump operating status.