Hot Leg Temperature Uncertainty due to Thermal Stratification

For the Reactor Coolant System(RCS) flow rate measurement by the secondary calorimetric heat balance method, the coolant temperature of the hot leg is needed. Several Resistance Temperature Detectors(RTD) are installed in the hot leg to measure the temperature, but the average value of RTDs does not correctly represent the energy-averaged(bulk) temperature because of the thermal stratification phenomenon. Therefore some correction is introduced to predict the bulk temperature, but the correction inevitably contains uncertainty because the stratification is not defined well quantitatively yet. Therefore a large uncertainty for the correction has been used for the conservative estimation. But unrealistically large uncertainty causes degradation of the measurement method and yields difficulty to meet the acceptance criterion in start-up flow measurement test. In this paper, an analytical estimation is made on the correction and the related uncertainty using the measured hot leg velocity profile of System 80 reactor flow model test and the measured temperatures of YGN 3&4 and PVNGS 1&2 start-up tests. The results reveal that the magnitude of the correction uncertainty is much smaller than that used in the previous design. Therefore, the confidence on the flow rate measurement method can be improved and the difficulty in start-up flow measurement test can be lessened if the smaller correction uncertainty obtained through this estimation is applied.