• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.33-44
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• 2006

This paper presents a review of small-to-medium-sized, pressurized-water-cooled nuclear power reactors whose major primary coolant systems are integrated into a reactor pressure vessel, the concepts categorized as Integrated Primary System Nuclear Reactors (IPSRs). Typical examples of these proposals of interest in this review are CAREM, SMART, IRIS and IMR, all of which are being aimed at the near term deployment. Emphasis is placed on thermal hydraulic aspects. A brief characterization of the IPSR concepts is made and comparisons of plant key parameters are shown. Discussions will follow for the core cooling under rated power conditions and natural circulation heat removal on the basis of the design data available in the public domain.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2022.04a
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• pp.174-175
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• 2022

The blast furnace slag, which is widely used as a cement admixture, has latent hydraulics under the influence of cement hydrate, and fly ash and silica fume mainly cause a pozolane reaction. As a result, the cement structure becomes dense, and it is possible to compensate for defects when concrete is usually made with portland cement alone. When fixing carbon dioxide through reaction with carbon dioxide, the amount of calcium hydroxide in the cement paste is important. The larger the amount of calcium hydroxide, the more active the reaction may occur. It is also an important variable in calculating the depth of neutralization through carbonization. In this study, calcium hydroxide in cement paste using mixed materials was quantified through thermal analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.753-764
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• 2009

JAEA started the LSTF experiments in 1985 for the fourth stage of the ROSA Program (ROSA-IV) for the LWR thermal-hydraulic safety research to identify and investigate the thermal-hydraulic phenomena and to confirm the effectiveness of ECCS during small-break LOCAs and operational transients. The LSTF experiments are underway for the ROSA-V Program and the OECD/NEA ROSA Project that intends to resolve issues in thermal-hydraulic analyses relevant to LWR safety. Six types of the LSTF experiments have been done for both the system integral and separate-effect experiments among international members from 14 countries. Results of four experiments for the ROSA Project are briefly presented with analysis by a best-estimate (BE) code and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to illustrate the capability of the LSTF and codes to simulate the thermal-hydraulic phenomena that may appear during SBLOCAs and transients. The thermal-hydraulic phenomena dealt with are coolant mixing and temperature stratification, water hammer up to high system pressure, natural circulation under high core power condition, and non-condensable gas effect during asymmetric SG depressurization as an AM action.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society for Energy Engineering kosee Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.120-125
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• 2007

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.135-138
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• 2015

A new correlation predicting the idealized critical mass-flow rates of water for subcooled and saturated liquid water including two-phase water flow was developed for a wide range of upstream stagnation pressures (e.g., 0.5-20.0 MPa). A choking correction factor dependent on the upstream stagnation pressure and subcooled temperature was introduced into a new correlation, and its values were suggested to satisfy the idealized nozzle data within 10% error ranges. The suggested correlation will be instructive and helpful for related studies and/or engineering works.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.9
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• pp.1171-1180
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• 2009

The internal core baffle structure of a French Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) consists of a collection of baffles and formers that are attached to the barrel. The connections are done thanks to a large number of bolts (about 1500). After inspection, some of the bolts have been found cracked. This has been attributed to the Irradiation Assisted Stress Corrosion Cracking (IASCC). The $Electricit\acute{e}$ De France (EDF) has set up a research program to gain better knowledge of the temperature distribution, which may affect the bolts and the whole structure. The temperature distribution in the structure was calculated thanks to the thermal code SYRTHES that used a finite element approach. The heat transfer between the by-pass flow inside the cavities of the core baffle and the structure was accounted for thanks to a strong thermal coupling between the thermal code SYRTHES and the CFD code named Code_Saturne. The results for the CP0 plant design show that both the high temperature and strong temperature gradients could potentially induce mechanical stresses. The CPY design, where each bolt is individually cooled, had led to a reduction of temperatures inside the structures. A new parallel version of SYRTHES, for calculations on very large meshes and based on MPI, has been developed. A demonstration test on the complete structure that has led to about 1.1 billion linear tetraedra has been calculated on 2048 processors of the EDF Blue Gene computer.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.1218-1230
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• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.20-26
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• 2017

The two-fluid equations are widely used to simulate two-phase flows in a nuclear reactor. For the two-fluid momentum equation, the wall and interfacial drag terms play an important role in predicting a two-phase flow behavior. Since the bubble density is much smaller than the water density, the bubble accelerates faster than the liquid in a nozzle. As a result, the bubble phase becomes faster than the liquid phase in the nozzle. In contrast, the opposite phenomena occur in the diffuser. The purpose of our study is to experimentally show these behaviors in an area-varying channel such as nozzle and diffuser. Experiments were made of turbulent bubbly flows in an area-varying horizontal channel. The velocities of the bubble and liquid phases were measured by the PIV technique. It was shown that the two-phase velocities were no longer close to each other in the area-varying regions. The bubble was faster than the liquid in the nozzle; in contrast, the bubble was slower than the liquid in the diffuser. Code simulations were also performed using the MARS code. By replacing the original wall drag model in the MARS code with Kim (1)'s wall drag partition model, we obtained the simulation results being consistent with experimental observations.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.71-79
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• 2014

A parallelization of the bi-conjugate gradient solver for the pressure equation of the CUPID (component unstructured program for interfacial dynamics) code, which was developed for analyzing the components of a pressurized water-cooled reactor, was studied in a symmetric multi-processing system. The parallel performance was investigated for three typical parallel programming models (MPI, OpenMP, Hybrid) by solving incompressible backward-facing step flow at various grid resolutions. It was confirmed that parallel performance was low when problem size was small or the memory requirement for each thread was considerably higher than the cache memory. Furthermore, it was shown that MPI was better than OpenMP regardless of the problem size, and Hybrid was the best when the number of threads was relatively small.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Systems Engineering
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.58-74
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• 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.