Fire is a typical scenario for nuclear accidents, in which uranium-containing materials will release uranium aerosols. Limited by many aspects, uranium aerosols cannot be used directly to carry out nuclear emergency training and equipment development research under real conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to filter and evaluate available surrogate materials through experiments. In this paper, metallic zinc is used to study the source term and particle size distribution of zinc aerosols under fire conditions, and the feasibility of zinc as a surrogate material for uranium aerosol research is evaluated based on the data of uranium aerosols in the literature. The experimental results show that the mass median aerodynamic diameter obtained by fitting with lognormal distribution is between 0.36 and 0.59 µm. The cumulative mass fraction distribution data are consistent with those given in the literature, indicating that the zinc aerosols generated under fire have a nice simulation effect on uranium aerosols in terms of particle size distribution. As for air release fraction (ARF) and respirable fraction (RF), the experiment of zinc aerosols is greater than that of uranium aerosols, which means the simulation in ARF and RF is not so good.

Uranium aerosols are released from uranium-containing materials in high-temperature environments caused by nuclear accidents or other processes. Research on the generation characteristics of uranium aerosols under such conditions is an important part of nuclear-safety analysis. In this experiment, the similarity between metal cerium aerosols and uranium material aerosols was evaluated from the aspects of particle size distribution and source term. Combined with the experiment data, the effect of air flow rate and sampling time is discussed. The calculation result of the air release fraction (ARF) is 6.07 × 10⁻³–4.8 × 10⁻², and the respirable fraction (RF) is 0.810–0.978, respectively, showing that the size distribution of particles and ARF of the cerium aerosol are different from the results of the uranium aerosols in the literature, while the RF is similar to the results obtained by using the uranium–niobium alloy in the literature.