• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제48권2호
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• pp.318-329
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• 2016

Reducing critical boron concentration in a commercial pressurized water reactor core offers many advantages in view of safety and economics. This paper presents a preliminary investigation of a reduced-boron pressurized water reactor core to achieve a clearly negative moderator temperature coefficient at hot zero power using the newly-proposed "Burnable absorber-Integrated Guide Thimble" (BigT) absorbers. The reference core is based on a commercial OPR1000 equilibrium configuration. The reduced-boron ORP1000 configuration was determined by simply replacing commercial gadolinia-based burnable absorbers with the optimized BigT-loaded design. The equilibrium cores in this study were directly searched via repetitive Monte Carlo depletion calculations until convergence. The results demonstrate that, with the same fuel management scheme as in the reference core, application of the BigT absorbers can effectively reduce the critical boron concentration at the beginning of cycle by about 65 ppm. More crucially, the analyses indicate promising potential of the reduced-boron OPR1000 core with the BigT absorbers, as its moderator temperature coefficient at the beginning of cycle is clearly more negative and all other vital neutronic parameters are within practical safety limits. All simulations were completed using the Monte Carlo Serpent code with the ENDF/B-VII.0 library.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제55권5호
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• pp.1892-1900
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• 2023

A protective oxide layer forms on the material surfaces of a Nuclear Power Plant during operation due to high temperature. These oxides can host radionuclides, the activated corrosion products of fission products, resulting in decommissioning workers' exposure. These deposited oxides are iron oxides such as Fe₃O₄, Fe₂O₃ and mixed ferrites such as nickel ferrites, chromium ferrites, and cobalt ferrites. Developing a new chemical decontamination technology for domestic CANDU-type reactors is challenging due to variations in oxide compositions from different structural materials in a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) system. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has already developed a chemical decontamination process for PWRs called 'HyBRID' (Hydrazine-Based Reductive metal Ion Decontamination) that does not use organic acids or organic chelating agents at all. As the first step to developing a new chemical decontamination technology for the Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) system, we investigated magnetite dissolution behaviors in various HyBRID inorganic acidic solutions to assess their applicability to the PHWR reactor system, which forms a thicker oxide film.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제48권6호
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• pp.1291-1302
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• 2016

This paper presents a new and efficient scheme to determine the optimal neutron source position in a model near-equilibrium pressurized water reactor, which is based on the OPR1000 Hanul Unit 3 Cycle 7 configuration. The proposed scheme particularly assigns importance of source positions according to the local adjoint flux distribution. In this research, detailed pin-by-pin reactor adjoint fluxes are determined by using the Monte Carlo KENO-VI code from solutions of the reactor homogeneous critical adjoint transport equations. The adjoint fluxes at each allowable source position are subsequently ranked to yield four candidate positions with the four highest adjoint fluxes. The study next simulates ex-core detector responses using the Monte Carlo MAVRIC code by assuming a neutron source is installed in one of the four candidate positions. The calculation is repeated for all positions. These detector responses are later converted into an inverse count rate ratio curve for each candidate source position. The study confirms that the optimal source position is the one with very high adjoint fluxes and detector responses, which is interestingly the original source position in the OPR1000 core, as it yields an inverse count rate ratio curve closest to the traditional 1/M line. The current work also clearly demonstrates that the proposed adjoint flux-based approach can be used to efficiently determine the optimal geometry for a neutron source and a detector in a modern pressurized water reactor core.

• 한국전산구조공학회논문집
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• 제20권4호
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• pp.427-433
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• 2007

가압경수로(PWR)에서 배출되는 고준위폐기물을 지하 500m의 화강암 암반의 처분장에 장기간(약 10,000년 동안) 처분하기 위하여 여러 구조적 안전성 평가 수행을 통하여 처분용기모델이 개발되었다. 기존에 설계된 가압경수로용 처분용기 모델은 구조적 안전성은 문제가 없으나 너무 무거운 단점이 지적되었다. 따라서 구조적 안전성을 유지하면서 좀 더 경량화 된 처분용기모델을 개발하는 것이 요구된다. 기존의 처분용기모델이 무거워진 한가지 이유는 처분용기 개발 시 적용된 외력조건 및 안전계수 등에 대한 조건들을 너무 엄격하게 적용했기 때문이라고 사료되기 때문에 이런 조건들을 완화하여 처분용기의 재원들을 조정하여 구조해석을 다시 수행하는 것이 요구된다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 설계 완성된 기존의 처분용기에 대하여 외력 조건 및 용기의 재원(두께 등) 들을 변화시키면서 구조해석을 재 수행하여 구조적 안전성 평가를 보완하였다. 이를 바탕으로 외력 조건에 따른 처분용기의 재원 등을 재 산출한다. 보완 해석 결과 기존의 122cm의 처분용기의 직경을 102cm까지 줄여 경량화 시킬 수 있음이 확인되었다.

• 한국정밀공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정밀공학회 2001년도 춘계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.594-597
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• 2001

As many industrial systems become more complex, they become extremely difficult to diagnose the cause of failures. The subject of this paper is ECCS(Emergency Core Cooling System) part of PWR(Pressurized Water Reactor). This paper presents modeling and diagnoser construction of ECCS based on discrete event system theory. Also, this paper presents that the ECCS system is diagnosible in our approach.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권2호
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• pp.479-489
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• 2019

Low-cycle fatigue (LCF) tests were performed for Alloy 690 and 316 SS in a simulated pressurized water reactor (PWR) environment. Alloy 690 showed about twice longer LCF life than 316 SS at the test condition of 0.4% amplitude at strain rate of 0.004%/s. Observation of the oxide layers formed on the fatigue crack surface showed that Cr and Ni rich oxide was formed for Alloy 690, while Fe and Cr rich oxide for 316 SS as an inner layer. Electrochemical analysis revealed that the oxide layers formed on the LCF crack surface of Alloy 690 had higher impedance and less defect density than those of 316 SS, which resulted in longer LCF life of Alloy 690 than 316 SS in a simulated PWR environment.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권4호
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• pp.1008-1016
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• 2019

In the SG (steam generator) of PWR (pressurized water reactor) for a nuclear plant, hundreds of U-shaped tubes are used for the heat exchanger system. They interact with primary pressurized cooling water flow, generating flow-induced vibration in the secondary flow region. A simplified U-tube model is proposed in this study to apply for experiment and its counterpart computation. Using the commercial code, ANSYS-CFX, we first verified the Moody chart, comparing the straight pipe theory with the results derived from CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis. Considering the virtual mass of fluid, we computed the major modes with the low natural frequencies through the comparison with impact hammer test, and then investigated the effect of pump flow in the frequency domain using FFT (fast Fourier transform) analysis of the experimental data. Using two-way fluid-structure interaction module in the CFD code, we studied the influence on mean flow rate to generate the displacement data. A feasible CFD method has been setup in this research that could be applied potentially in the field of nuclear thermal-hydraulics.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권3호
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• pp.793-803
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• 2021

The small PWR has been paid more and more attention due to its diversity of application and flexibility in the site selection. However, the large core power density, the small containment space and the rapid accident progress characteristics make it difficult to control the containment pressure like the traditional PWR during the LOCA. The pressure suppression system has been used by the BWR since the early design, which is a suitable technique that can be applied to the small PWR. Since the configuration and operating conditions are different from the BWR, the pressure suppression system should be redesigned for the small PWR. Conducting the experiments on the scale down test facility is a good choice to reproduce the prototypical phenomena in the test facility, which is both economical and reasonable. A systematic scaling method referring to the H2TS method was proposed to determine the geometrical and thermohydraulic parameters of the pressure suppression containment response test facility for the small PWR conceptual design. The containment and the pressure suppression system related thermohydraulic phenomena were analyzed with top-down and bottom-up scaling methods. A set of the scaling criteria were obtained, through which the main parameters of the test facility can be determined.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권7호
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• pp.1765-1775
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• 2019

Multiple spurious operations (MSOs) mean multiple fire induced circuit faults causing an undesired operation of one or more systems or components. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) of the United States published NEI 00-01 as guidelines for solving MSOs. And this guideline includes MSO scenarios of pressurized water reactor (PWR) and boiling water reactor (BWR). Nuclear power plant operators in U.S. analyzed MSOs under MSO scenarios included in NEI 00-01 and operators of PWRs in Korea also analyzed MSOs under the scenarios of NEI 00-01. As there are no pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs) in the United States, MSO scenarios of PHWRs are not included in the NEI 00-01 and any feasible scenarios have not been developed. This paper developed MSO scenarios which can be applied to PHWRs by reviewing the 63 MSO scenarios included in NEI 00-01. This study found that seven scenarios out of the 63 MSO scenarios can be applied and three more scenarios need to be developed.

• 대한전기학회논문지
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• 제38권11호
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• pp.861-869
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• 1989

본 논문에서는 폰트라이긴의 최대원리를 이용한 가압경수형 원자로(PWR)의 부하추종 운전시 제논진동 최적화 문제가 제시되었다. 최적화 모델은 2차 목적함수를 갖고 있는 최적 추적제어문제로 정식화 하였으며, 1군 확산방정식과 제논-아이오다인 동특성 방정식을 등호 제약조건으로 고려하였다. 최적화 모델에 최대원리를 적용하므로서, 문제는 제약조건이 없는 단일시간 문제로 분리되었으며, 분리된 부 문제는 공액 경사법을 이용하여 최적화 하였다. 계산결과는 제논진동이 최소화되어 원자로가 규정된 출력분포를 유지하면서 전력계총에서 요구하는 출력을 잘 추종 하였다.