• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.1017-1023
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• 2018

The measurement and calculation of neutronic parameters in nuclear research reactors has an important influence on control and safety of the nuclear reactor. The power peaking factors, reactivity coefficients and kinetic parameters are the most important neutronic parameter for determining the state of the reactor. The position of the control shim safety rods in the core configuration affects these parameters. The main purpose of this work is to use the MTR_PC package to evaluate the effect of the partially insertion of the control rod on the neutronic parameters at the operating core of the Tehran Research Reactor. The simulation results show that by increasing the insertion of control rods (bank) in the core, the absolute values of power peaking factor, reactivity coefficients and effective delayed neutron fraction increased and only prompt neutron life time decreased. In addition, the results show that the changes of moderator temperature coefficients value versus the control rods positions are very significant. The average value of moderator temperature coefficients increase about 98% in the range of 0-70% insertion of control rods.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2377-2386
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• 2021

To model the atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides released from nuclear accident is very important for nuclear emergency. But the uncertainty of model parameters, such as source term and meteorological data, may significantly affect the prediction accuracy. Data assimilation (DA) is usually used to improve the model prediction with the measurements. The paper proposed a parameter bias transformation method combined with Lagrangian puff model to perform DA. The method uses the transformation of coordinates to approximate the effect of parameters bias. The uncertainty of four model parameters is considered in the paper: release rate, wind speed, wind direction and plume height. And particle swarm optimization is used for searching the optimal parameters. Twin experiment and Kincaid experiment are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can effectively increase the reliability of model prediction and estimate the parameters. It has the advantage of clear concept and simple calculation. It will be useful for improving the result of atmospheric dispersion model at the early stage of nuclear emergency.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.1687-1707
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• 2023

This paper presents a molten salt reactor (MSR) design parameter sensitivity study using a nodal dynamic modelling methodology with explicitly modified point kinetics equation and Mann's model for heat transfer. Six parameters that can impact MSR safety are evaluated. A MATLAB-Simulink model inspired by Thorcon's 550MWth MSR is used for parameter evaluations. A safety envelope was formed to encapsulate power, maximum and minimum temperature, and temperature-induced reactivity feedback. The parameters are perturbed by ±30%. The parameters were then ranked by their subsequent impact on the considered safety envelope, which ranks acceptable parameter uncertainty. The model is openly available on GitHub.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.8
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• pp.1277-1288
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• 2018

In this work, the reactor kinetics capability is used to compute the design safety parameters in a PWR due to complete loss of coolant flow during protected and unprotected accidents. A thermal-hydraulic code coupled with a point reactor kinetic model are used for these calculations; where kinetics parameters have been developed from the neutronic SRAC code to provide inputs to RELAP5-3D code to calculate parameters related to safety and guarantee that they meet the regulatory requirements. In RELAP5-3D the reactivity feedback is computed by both separable and tabular models. The results show the importance of the reactivity feedback on calculating the power which is the key parameter that controls the clad and fuel temperatures to maintain them below their melting point and therefore prevent core melt. In addition, extending modeling capability from separable to tabular model has nonremarkable influence on calculated safety parameters.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.136-142
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• 2014

Recently a new version of PRO-LOCA program was released. Using the program, failure probability of pipes can be evaluated considering fatigue and/or stress corrosion crack growth and the effects of various parameters on the integrity of pipes in nuclear power plants can be evaluated quantitatively. The analysis results can be used to establish an inspection plan and to examine the effects of important parameters in a maintenance plan. In this study, sensitivity analyses were performed using the program for several important parameters including sampling method, initial crack size, number of initial fabrication flaws, operation temperature, inspection interval, operation temperature and nominal applied bending stress. The effect of parameters on the leak and rupture probability of pipes was evaluated due to fatigue or stress corrosion crack growth.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.71-78
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• 2011

This paper contains the selection of operation parameters for protection and control of steam turbine in a Korea Standard Type Nuclear Power Plant. The safety of nuclear reactor must be ensured which generates nuclear energy and produces steam. Also, the safety of turbine, which consume the nuclear energy as a core machine, must be ensured. For the purpose of this, we describe how the operating parameters were selected, reviewed, implemented into the operator console and finally put into actual operation of the system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.332-339
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• 2015

The leak before break (LBB) concept is widely used in designing pipe lines in nuclear power plants. According to the concept, the amount of leaking liquid from a pipe should be more than the minimum detectable leak rate of a leak detection system before catastrophic failure occurs. Therefore, accurate estimation of the leak rate is important to evaluate the validity of the LBB concept in pipe line design. In this paper, a program was developed to estimate the leak rate through circumferential cracks in pipes in nuclear power plants using the Henry-Fauske flow model and modified Henry-Fauske flow model. By using the developed program, the leak rate was calculated for a circumferential crack in a sample pipe, and the effect of the flow model on the leak rate was examined. Treating the crack morphology parameters as random variables, the statistical behavior of the leak rate was also examined. As a result, it was found that the crack morphology parameters have a strong effect on the leak rate and the statistical behavior of the leak rate can be simulated using normally distributed crack morphology parameters.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.460-467
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• 2010

In this study, the parameters of the feedwater control system (FWCS) of the OPR1000 type nuclear power plant (NPP) are optimized by response surface methodology (RSM) in order to acquire better level control performance from the FWCS. The objective of the optimization is to minimize the steam generator (SG) water level deviation from the reference level during transients. The objective functions for this optimization are relationships between the SG level deviation and the parameters of the FWCS. However, in this case of FWCS parameter optimization, the objective functions are not available in the form of analytic equations and the responses (the SG level at plant transients) to inputs (FWCS parameters) can be evaluated by computer simulations only. Classical optimization methods cannot be used because the objective function value cannot be calculated directely. Therefore, the simulation optimization methodology is used and the RSM is adopted as the simulation optimization algorithm. Objective functions are evaluated with several typical transients in NPPs using a system simulation computer code that has been utilized for the system performance analysis of actual NPPs. The results show that the optimized parameters have better SG level control performance. The degree of the SG level deviation from the reference level during transients is minimized and consequently the control performance of the FWCS is remarkably improved.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.131-137
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• 2015

For the evaluation of safety margin of a nuclear power plant using a conservative methodology, the influence of applied assumptions such as initial conditions and boundary conditions needs to be assessed deliberately. Usually, a combination of the most conservative initial conditions is determined, and the safety margin for the transient is evaluated through the analysis for this conservative conditions. In existing conservative methodologies, a most-conservative condition is searched through the analyses for the maximum, minimum, and nominal values of the major parameters. In the present study, we investigates a new approach which can be applied to choose a most-conservative initial condition effectively when a best-estimate computer code and a conservative evaluation methodology are utilized for the evaluation of safety margin of transients. By constituting the band of various initial conditions using the random sampling of input parameters, the sensitivity study for various parameters are performed systematically. A method of sampling the value of control or operation parameters for a certain range is adopted by use of MOSAIQUE program, which enables to minimize the efforts for achieving the steady-state for various different conditions. A representative control parameter is identified, which governs the reactor coolant flow rate, pressurizer pressure, pressurizer level, and steam generator level, respectively. It is shown that an appropriate distribution of input parameter is obtained by adjusting the range and distribution of the control parameter.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.11
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• pp.4181-4194
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• 2022

Main steam safety valves are commonly used in nuclear power plants to provide final protections from overpressure events. Blowdown and dynamic stability are two critical characteristics of safety valves. However, due to the parameter sensitivity and multi-parameter features of safety valves, using traditional method to design and/or optimize them is generally difficult and/or inefficient. To overcome these problems, a surrogate model-based valve design optimization is carried out in this study, of particular interest are methods of valve surrogate modeling, valve parameters global sensitivity analysis and valve performance optimization. To construct the surrogate model, Design of Experiments (DoE) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of the safety valve were performed successively, thereby an ensemble surrogate model (E-AHF) was built for valve blowdown and stability predictions. With the developed E-AHF model, global sensitivity analysis (GSA) on the valve parameters was performed, thereby five primary parameters that affect valve performance were identified. Finally, the k-sigma method is used to conduct the robust optimization on the valve. After optimization, the valve remains stable, the minimum blowdown of the safety valve is reduced greatly from 13.30% to 2.70%, and the corresponding variance is reduced from 1.04 to 0.65 as well, confirming the feasibility and effectiveness of the optimization method proposed in this paper.