Design Re-engineering of the Lower Support Structure of the APR1400 Reactor Internals

This paper aims to evaluate the conservatism in the design of APR1400 (Advanced Pressurized water Reactor 1400 designed by KHNP) reactor internals component, the LSS (Lower Support Structure). Re-engineering of the LSS is done based on the system design condition data and applicable ASME code that was used for the original APR1400 design. Systems engineering approach is applied to design the LSS of APR1400 without refering APR1400 LSS dimensional parameters and tries to verify important design parameters of APR1400 LSS as well as the validity of the re-engineering design process as independent verification method of reactor component design. Systems engineering approach applied in this study following V-model approach. The re-engineered LSS design showed more than enough conservatism for static loading case. The maximum deflection of LSS is under 1mm (calculated value is 0.25mm) from 4000 mm diameter of LSS. Hence the deflection can be ignored in other reactor internals for structural integrity assessment. Especially the effect of LSS deflection on fuel assembly can be minimized and which is one of the main requirements of LSS design. It also showed that the maximum stress intensity is 2.36MPa for the allowable stress intensity of 60.1 MPa. The stress resulted from the static load is also very small compared to the maximum allowable stress intensity, hence there is more than enough conservatism in the LSS design.