• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제49권5호
• /
• pp.968-978
• /
• 2017

Three small-break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA) tests with safety injection pumps were carried out using the integral-effect test loop for SMART (System-integrated Modular Advanced ReacTor), i.e., the SMART-ITL facility. The types of break are a safety injection system line break, shutdown cooling system line break, and pressurizer safety valve line break. The thermal-hydraulic phenomena show a traditional behavior to decrease the temperature and pressure whereas the local phenomena are slightly different during the early stage of the transient after a break simulation. A safety injection using a high-pressure pump effectively cools down and recovers the inventory of a reactor coolant system. The global trends show reproducible results for an SBLOCA scenario with three different break locations. It was confirmed that the safety injection system is robustly safe enough to protect from a core uncovery.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제56권8호
• /
• pp.2893-2905
• /
• 2024

Passive safety systems are integrated into the latest generation of Light Water Reactors (LWRs), including small modular reactors. This paper employs the US-NRC TRACE thermal hydraulic code to examine the performance of a passive safety condenser known as SACO, designed to serve as the ultimate heat sink for dissipating decay heat during accident scenarios. The TRACE model is constructed with reference to the PKL/SACO test facility. The safety condenser (SACO) is interconnected with the PKL facility via the secondary side of steam generator 1, effectively serving as a third natural circulation cooling loop during accident scenarios. In the present research, the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the PKL facility is investigated in the presence of the SACO passive safety system during an extended SBO with Loss of AC Power accident scenario. This SBO can be categorized into three distinct phases depending on the activation of the SACO system and the refilling process of the SACO pool. The first phase is depressurizing using primary and secondary relief valves, the second phase is cooling down using SACO system, and the third phase is the refilling of SACO pool. The findings indicate that the SACO system effectively manages to dissipate all decay heat, even though there is temporary evaporation of the SACO water pool. Furthermore, this study provides sensitivity analysis for the assessments of system codes on the selection of maximum time step.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제51권5호
• /
• pp.1218-1230
• /
• 2019

A sub-channel solver, named ${\underline{S}}teady$ and ${\underline{T}}ransient$ ${\underline{A}}nalyzer$ for ${\underline{R}}eactor$ ${\underline{T}}hermal$ hydraulics (START), has been developed using the homogenous model for two-phase conditions of light water reactors. The code is developed as a fast and accurate TH-solver for coupled and multi-physics calculations. START has been validated against the NUPEC PWR Sub-channel and Bundle Test (PSBT) database. Tests like single-channel quality and void-fraction for steady state, outlet fluid temperature for steady state, rod-bundle quality and void-fraction for both steady state and transient conditions have been analyzed and compared with experimental values. Results reveal a good accuracy of solution for both steady state and transient scenarios. Axially different values for turbulent mixing coefficient are used based on different grid-spacer types. This provides better results as compared to using a single value of turbulent mixing coefficient. Code-to-code evaluation of PSBT results by the START code compares well with other industrial codes. The START code has been parallelized with the OpenMP algorithm and its numerical performance is evaluated with a large whole PWR core. Scaling study of START shows a good parallel performance.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권5호
• /
• pp.1911-1923
• /
• 2023

The nuclear safety assessment involving large transient simulations is forcing the community to develop methods for coupling thermal-hydraulics and neutronic codes and three-dimensional (3D) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes. In this paper a set of dynamic boundary conditions are implemented in OpenFOAM^Ⓡ in order to apply zero-dimensional (0D) approaches coupling with 3D thermal-hydraulic simulation in a single framework. This boundary conditions are applied to model pipelines, tanks, pumps, and heat exchangers. On a first stage, four tests are perform in order to assess the implementations. The results are compared with experimental data, full 3D CFD, and system code simulations, finding a general good agreement. The semi-implicit implementation nature of these boundary conditions has shown robustness and accuracy for large time steps. Finally, an application case, consisting of a simplified open pool with a cooling external circuit is solved to remark the capability of the tool to simulate thermal hydraulic systems commonly found in nuclear installations.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제50권3호
• /
• pp.356-367
• /
• 2018

A series of tests dedicated to station blackout (SBO) accident scenarios have been recently performed at the $Prim{\ddot{a}}rkreislauf-Versuchsanlage$ (primary coolant loop test facility; PKL) facility in the framework of the OECD/NEA PKL-3 project. These investigations address current safety issues related to beyond design basis accident transients with significant core heat up. This work presents a detailed analysis using the best estimate thermal-hydraulic code TRACE (v5.0 Patch4) of different SBO scenarios conducted at the PKL facility; failures of high- and low-pressure safety injection systems together with steam generator (SG) feedwater supply are considered, thus calling for adequate accident management actions and timely implementation of alternative emergency cooling procedures to prevent core meltdown. The presented analysis evaluates the capability of the applied TRACE model of the PKL facility to correctly capture the sequences of events in the different SBO scenarios, namely the SBO tests H2.1, H2.2 run 1 and H2.2 run 2, including symmetric or asymmetric secondary side depressurization, primary side depressurization, accumulator (ACC) injection in the cold legs and secondary side feeding with mobile pump and/or primary side emergency core coolant injection from the fuel pool cooling pump. This study is focused specifically on the prediction of the core exit temperature, which drives the execution of the most relevant accident management actions. This work presents, in particular, the key improvements made to the TRACE model that helped to improve the code predictions, including the modeling of dynamical heat losses, the nodalization of SGs' heat exchanger tubes and the ACCs. Another relevant aspect of this work is to evaluate how well the model simulations of the three different scenarios qualitatively and quantitatively capture the trends and results exhibited by the actual experiments. For instance, how the number of SGs considered for secondary side depressurization affects the heat transfer from primary side; how the discharge capacity of the pressurizer relief valve affects the dynamics of the transient; how ACC initial pressure and nitrogen release affect the grace time between ACC injection and subsequent core heat up; and how well the alternative feeding modes of the secondary and/or primary side with mobile injection pumps affect core quenching and ensure stable long-term core cooling under controlled boiling conditions.

• 한국원자력학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국원자력학회 2001년도 춘계학술발표회요약집
• /
• pp.257.2-257
• /
• 2001

• 한국원자력학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국원자력학회 2002년도 추계학술발표회요약집
• /
• pp.209.1-209
• /
• 2002

• 한국전산유체공학회지
• /
• 제14권4호
• /
• pp.13-22
• /
• 2009

A two-phase (gas and liquid) flow analysis solver, named CUPID, has been developed for a realistic simulation of transient two-phase flows in light water nuclear reactor components. In the CUPID solver, a two-fluid three-field model is adopted and the governing equations are solved on unstructured grids for flow analyses in complicated geometries. For the numerical solution scheme, the semi-implicit method of the RELAP5 code, which has been proved to be very stable and accurate for most practical applications of nuclear thermal hydraulics, was used with some modifications for an application to unstructured non-staggered grids. This paper is concerned with the effects of interpolation schemes on the simulation of two-phase flows. In order to stabilize a numerical solution and assure a high numerical accuracy, the second-order upwind scheme is implemented into the CUPID code in the present paper. Some numerical tests have been performed with the implemented scheme and the comparison results between the second-order and first-order upwind schemes are introduced in the present paper. The comparison results among the two interpolation schemes and either the exact solutions or the mesh convergence studies showed the reduced numerical diffusion with the second-order scheme.

• 한국원자력학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국원자력학회 1996년도 춘계학술발표회논문집(2)
• /
• pp.193-198
• /
• 1996

In this study the RETRAN-03 code was modified to analyze the thermal-hydraulic transients under three-dimensional ship motions for the application to the future marine reactors. First Japanese nuclear ship MUTSU reactor have been analyzed under various ship motions to verify this code. As results, typical thermal-hydraulic characteristics of marine reactors such as flow rate oscillations and S/G water level oscillations are successfully simulated at various conditions.

• 시스템엔지니어링학술지
• /
• 제18권2호
• /
• pp.58-74
• /
• 2022

Deterministic accident analysis plays a central role in the nuclear power plant (NPP) safety evaluation and licensing process. Traditionally the conservative approach opted for the point kinetics model, expressing the reactor core parameters in the form of reactivity and power tables. However, with the current advances in computational power, high fidelity multi-physics simulations using real-time code coupling, can provide more detailed core behavior and hence more realistic plant's response. This is particularly relevant for transients where the core is undergoing reactivity anomalies and uneven power distributions with strong feedback mechanisms, such as reactivity initiated accidents (RIAs). This work addresses a RIA, specifically a control element assembly (CEA) withdrawal at power, using the multi-physics analysis tool RELAP5/MOD 3.4/3DKIN. The thermal-hydraulics (TH) code, RELAP5, is internally coupled with the nodal kinetics (NK) code, 3DKIN, and both codes exchange relevant data to model the nuclear power plant (NPP) response as the CEA is withdrawn from the core. The coupled model is more representative of the complex interactions between the thermal-hydraulics and neutronics; therefore the results obtained using a multi-physics simulation provide a larger safety margin and hence more operational flexibility compared to those of the point kinetics model reported in the safety analysis report for APR1400. The systems engineering approach is used to guide the development of the work ensuring a systematic and more efficient execution.