• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.9
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• pp.3320-3325
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• 2023

The scaled water-cooled Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS) experimental facility reproduces a passive safety feature to be implemented in Generation IV nuclear reactors. It keeps the reactor cavity and other internal structures in operational conditions by removing heat leakage from the reactor pressure vessel. The present work uses Flownex one-dimensional thermal-fluid code to model the facility and predict the experimental thermal-hydraulic behavior. Two representative steady-state cases defined by the bulk volumetric flow rate are simulated (Re = 2,409 and Re = 11,524). Results of the cavity outlet temperature, risers' temperature profile, and volumetric flow split in the cooling panel are also compared with the experimental data and RELAP system code simulations. The comparisons are in reasonable agreement with the previous studies, demonstrating the ability of Flownex to simulate the RCCS behavior. It is found that the low Re case of 2,409, temperature and flow split are evenly distributed across the risers. On the contrary, there's an asymmetry trend in both temperature and flow split distributions for the high Re case of 11,524.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1998.05a
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• pp.777-782
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• 1998

To terminate the progression of the sever accident and mitigate the accident consequences, corium coaling has been suggested as one of most important design features considered in the swore accident mitigation. Till now, some kinds of cooling methodologies have been identified and, specially the corium cooling at the reactor cavity has been considered as one of the most promising cooling methodologies. Moreover, several design requirements related to the cerium cooling at the reactor cavity have been also suggested and applied to the design of the next generation reactor. In this study technical description are briefly described for the important issues related to the cerium cooling at the reactor cavity, i.e. cavity area, cavity flooding system, etc., and simple evaluation for those items have been performed considering present technical levels the experiment and analytical works..

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.360-372
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• 2017

Many advanced reactor designs rely on passive systems to fulfill safety functions during accident sequences. These systems depend heavily on boundary conditions to induce a motive force, meaning the system can fail to operate as intended because of deviations in boundary conditions, rather than as the result of physical failures. Furthermore, passive systems may operate in intermediate or degraded modes. These factors make passive system operation difficult to characterize within a traditional probabilistic framework that only recognizes discrete operating modes and does not allow for the explicit consideration of time-dependent boundary conditions. Argonne National Laboratory has been examining various methodologies for assessing passive system reliability within a probabilistic risk assessment for a station blackout event at an advanced small modular reactor. This paper provides an overview of a passive system reliability demonstration analysis for an external event. Considering an earthquake with the possibility of site flooding, the analysis focuses on the behavior of the passive Reactor Cavity Cooling System following potential physical damage and system flooding. The assessment approach seeks to combine mechanistic and simulation-based methods to leverage the benefits of the simulation-based approach without the need to substantially deviate from conventional probabilistic risk assessment techniques. Although this study is presented as only an example analysis, the results appear to demonstrate a high level of reliability of the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (and the reactor system in general) for the postulated transient event.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.45-60
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• 2006

Presently, the VHTGR (Very High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor) is considered the most attractive candidate for a GEN-IV reactor to produce hydrogen, which will be a key resource for future energy production. A new concept for a reactor cavity cooling system (RCCS), a critical safety feature in the VHTGR, is proposed in the present study. The proposed RCCS consists of passive water pool and active air cooling systems. These are employed to overcome the poor cooling capability of the air-cooled RCCS and the complex cavity structures of the water-cooled RCCS. In order to estimate the licensibility of the proposed design, its performance and integrity were tested experimentally with a reduced-scale mock-up facility, as well as with a separate-effect test facility (SET) for the 1/4 water pool of the RCCS-SNU to examine the heat transfer and pressure drop and code capability. This paper presents the test results for SET and validation of MARS-GCR, a system code for the safety analysis of a HTGR. In addition, CFX5.7, a computational fluid dynamics code, was also used for the code-to-code benchmark of MARS-GCR. From the present experimental and numerical studies, the efficacy of MARS-GCR in application to determining the optimal design of complicated systems such as a RCCS and evaluation of their feasibility has been validated.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.271-278
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• 2020

The investigation into a full-scale 27 m high, by 6 m wide, thermosyphon loop. The simulation model is based on a one-dimensional axially-symmetrical control volume approach, where the loop is divided into a series of discreet control volumes. The three conservation equations, namely, mass, momentum and energy, were applied to these control volumes and solved with an explicit numerical method. The flow is assumed to be quasi-static, implying that the mass-flow rate changes over time. However, at any instant in time the mass-flow rate is constant around the loop. The boussinesq approximation was invoked, and a reasonable correlation between the experimental and theoretical results was obtained. Experimental results are presented and the flow regimes of the working fluid inside the loop identified. The results indicate that a series of such thermosyphon loops can be used as a cavity cooling system and that the one-dimensional theoretical model can predict the internal temperature and mass-flow rate of the thermosyphon loop.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1996.11a
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• pp.309-314
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• 1996

Feasibility study has been accomplished to evaluate the effectiveness of the in-vessel core debris cooling through lower cavity flooding using two dimensional finite difference scheme. The volume of cerium pool and decay power rate generated in corium pool were evaluated as important parameters to the temperature distribution on the reactor vessel lower head through previous works. In this study, the corium volume based on the System 80＋ core structure and time dependent decay power rate are considered for feasibility evaluation. In addition, preliminary plans for the in-vessel core debris cooling through lower cavity flooding as severe accident management strategy, i.e. flooding timing, method and capacity, are suggested based on the result of the numerical study, international tendency related to in-vessel core debris cooling through lower cavity flooding.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.37-38
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• 2005

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.482-490
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• 2007

When a molten corium is relocated in a lower head of a reactor vessel, the ERVC (External Reactor Vessel Cooling) system is actuated as coolant is supplied into a reactor cavity to remove a decay heat from the molten corium during a severe accident. To achieve this severe accident mitigation strategy, the two-phase natural circulation flow in the annular gap between the external reactor vessel and the insulation should be formed sufficiently by designing the coolant inlet/outlet area and gap size adequately on the insulation device. For this reason, one-dimensional natural circulation flow tests and the simple analysis were conducted to estimate the natural circulation flow under the ERVC condition of APR1400. The experimental facility is one-dimensional and scaled down as the half height and 1/238 channel area of the APR1400 reactor vessel. The calculated circulation flow rate was similar to experimental ones within about ${\pm}$15% error bounds and depended on the form loss due to the inlet/outlet area.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.1310-1319
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• 2024

The reactor cavity cooling system (RCCS) is a passive reactor safety system commonly present in the designs of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGR) that removes heat from the reactor pressure vessel by means of natural convection and radiation. It is one of the factors responsible for ensuring that the reactor does not melt down under any plausible accident scenario. For the simulation of accident scenarios, which are transient phenomena unfolding over a span of up to several days, intermediate fidelity methods and system codes must be employed to limit the models' execution time. These models can quantify radiation heat transfer well, but heat transfer caused by natural convection must be quantified with the use of correlations for the heat transfer coefficient. It is difficult to obtain reliable correlations for HTGR RCCS heat transfer coefficients experimentally due to such a system's size. They could, however, be obtained from high-fidelity steady-state simulations of RCCSs. The Rayleigh number in RCCSs is too high for using a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) technique; thus, a Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach must be employed. There are many RANS models, each performing best under different geometry and fluid flow conditions. To find the most suitable one for simulating an RCCS, the RANS models need to be validated. This work benchmarks various RANS models against three experiments performed on the HTTR RCCS Mockup by the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) in 1993. This facility is a 1/6 scale model of a vessel cooling system (VCS) for the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR), which is operated by JAEA. Multiple RANS models were evaluated on a simplified 2d-axisymmetric geometry. They were found to reproduce the experimental temperature profiles with errors of up to 22% for the lowest temperature benchmark and 15% for the higher temperature benchmarks. The results highlight that the pragmatic turbulence models need to be validated for high Rayleigh natural convection-driven flows and improved accordingly, more publicly available experimental data of RCCS resembling experiments is needed and indicate that a 2d-axisymmetric geometry approximation is likely insufficient to capture all the relevant phenomena in RCCS simulations.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2007.05b
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• pp.3086-3091
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• 2007

When a molten corium is relocated in a lower head of a reactor vessel, the ERVC (External Reactor Vessel Cooling) system is actuated as coolant is supplied into a reactor cavity to remove a decay heat from the molten corium during a severe accident. To achieve this severe accident mitigation strategy, the two-phase natural circulation flow in the annular gap between the external reactor vessel and the insulation should be formed sufficiently by designing the coolant inlet/outlet area and gap size adequately on the insulation device. For this reason, one-dimensional natural circulation flow tests were conducted to estimate the natural circulation flow under the ERVC condition of APR1400. The experimental facility is one-dimensional and scaled-down as the half height and 1/238 rectangular channel area of the APR1400 reactor vessel. As the water inlet area increased, the natural circulation mass flow rate asymptotically increased, that is, it converged at a specific value. And the circulation mass flow rate also increased as the outlet area, injected air flow rate, and outlet height increased. But the circulation mass flow rate was not changed along with the external water level variation if the water level was higher than the outlet height.