• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1369-1374
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• 2014

Most accidents of medium-voltage cables installed in nuclear power plants result from the initial defect of internal insulators or the initial failure due to poor construction. However, as the service years of plants increase, the possibility of cable accidents is also rapidly increases. This is primarily caused by electric, mechanical, thermal, and radiation stresses. Recently, much attention is paid to the study of cable diagnoses. To date, partial discharge and Tan${\delta}$ measurements are known as reliable methods to diagnose the aging of medium-voltage cables. High frequency partial discharge measurement techniques have been widely used to diagnose cables in transmission and distribution systems. However, the on-line high frequency partial discharge technique has not been used in the nuclear power plants because of the plant shutdown risk, degraded measurement sensitivity, and application problems. In this paper, the partial discharge measurement with a portable device was tried to evaluate the integrity of the 4.16kV and 13.8kV cable lines. The test results show that the high detection sensitivity can be achieved by the high frequency partial discharge technique. The present technique is highly attractive to diagnose medium voltage cables in nuclear power plants.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.1574-1583
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• 2024

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are compact nuclear reactors designed to generate electric power up to 300 MWe. They could be assembled in factory, and then transported to be directly installed on-stie. CAREM (Central Argentina de Elementos Modulares) is a national SMR development project, based on light water reactor technology supervised by Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA). It is a natural circulation-based SMR with an indirect-cycle, including specific items and parts that simplify the design and improve safety performance. In this paper, the thermal-hydraulic study of CAREM-25 advanced small modular reactor is conducted by using COBRA-EN modified code and the Porous Media Approach (PMA) for the first time. According to PMA approach, each fuel assembly is modeled and divided into a network of lumped regions. While complex geometries are defined, the thermal-hydraulic parameters such as temperature and density are calculated for coolant and fuel rods. The obtained results show that the temperature in the fuel center may reach a peak around 1280 K in the hottest fuel assembly. Finally, the comparison of results from both methods (modified COBRA-EN and PMA) presented an appropriate consistency.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.9
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• pp.2130-2137
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• 2020

The standard method for calculating anti-neutrino emissions from a reactor involves knowing the fractional fission rates for the most important fissioning nuclides in the reactor. To calculate these rates requires detailed reactor physics calculations based upon the reactor design, fuel design, burnup dependent fuel composition, location of specific fuel assemblies in the core and detailed operational data from the reactor. This has only been published for a few reactors during specific time periods, whereas to be of practical use for anti-neutrino reactor monitoring it is necessary to be able to predict these on the publicly available information from any reactor, especially if using these data to subtract the anti-neutrino signal from other reactors to identify an undeclared reactor and monitor its operation. This paper proposes a method to estimate the fission fractions for a specific reactor based upon publicly available information and provides a database based upon a series of spent fuel inventory calculations using the FISPIN10 code and its associated data libraries.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.254-259
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• 2015

On January 30, 2012 an auxiliary component of Byron Unit 2 was tripped on bus under voltage. The cause of the event was the failure of the C-phase insulator track for the Unit 2 station auxiliary transformer(SAT) revenue metering transformer. In addition to this event, other events have occurred at other plants resulting in an open-phase condition.[1] Therefore, Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) has requested that not only nuclear power plant(NPP) operating company but also its Design Certification(DC) applicant have to prepare open-phase detecting system in their operating plants and design document. In this paper, various open-phase conditions are simulated in NPP using Electromagnetic Transient Program(EMTP) and Atpdraw, and open-phase condition detecting system is proposed for Main Transformer(MT), Unit Auxiliary Transformer(UAT) and SAT connected power line in NPP.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2006

The interaction and mixing of high-temperature melt and water is the important technical issue in the safety assessment of water-cooled reactors to achieve ultimate core coolability. For specific advanced light water reactor (ALWR) designs, deliberate mixing of the core-melt and water is being considered as a mitigative measure, to assure ex-vessel core coolability. The paper provides the background of past experiments as well as key fundamentals that are needed for melt-water interfacial transport phenomena, thus enabling the development of innovative safety technologies for advanced LWRs that will assure ex-vessel core coolability.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1996.05a
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• pp.148-153
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• 1996

In this paper, an effective method for resolving difficulty resulting from the heterogeneity of the PWR baffle/reflector region is developed on the basis of the AFEN method. The essential difference of the new method from the conventional approach based on the equivalence theory is that the heterogeneous baffle/reflector is directly, without homogenization, considered as a node in nodal calculation Numerical results show that AFEN method with the new method can accurately predict both the multiplication factor and the power distribution of thermal reactors with baffle explicitly modeled.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.94-101
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• 2015

This paper presents findings on the second-order sliding-mode controller for a nuclear research reactor. Sliding-mode controllers for nuclear reactors have been used for some time, but higher-order sliding-mode controllers have the added advantage of reduced chattering. The nonlinear model of Pakistan Research Reactor-1 has been used for higherorder sliding-mode controller design and performance evaluation. The reactor core is simulated based on point kinetics equations and one delayed neutron groups. The model assumes feedback from lumped fuel and coolant temperatures. The effect of xenon concentration is also considered. The employed method is easy to implement in practical applications, and the second-order sliding-mode control exhibits the desired dynamic properties during the entire output-tracking process. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller in terms of performance, robustness, and stability.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.437-443
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• 2024

The development and testing of inspection equipment is necessary for the safe deployment of advanced nuclear reactors. One proposed advanced reactor design is Westinghouse's lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR). In this paper, the process of achieving adequate wetting for an ultrasonic under-lead viewing system is discussed and results presented. Such a device would be used for inspection in the molten lead core during reactor outages. Wider tests into the wetting of various materials in molten lead at microscale were performed using electron microscopy. The possible mechanisms and kinetics for materials wetting in lead, particularly stainless steel and nickel, are proposed and discussed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.5
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• pp.878-888
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• 2020

This paper presents the validation of UNIST in-house Monte Carlo code MCS used for the high-fidelity simulation of commercial pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Its focus is on the accurate, spatially detailed neutronic analyses of startup physics tests for the initial core of the Watts Bar Nuclear 1 reactor, which is a vital step in evaluating core phenomena in an operating nuclear power reactor. The MCS solutions for the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) core physics benchmark progression problems 1 to 5 were verified with KENO-VI and Serpent 2 solutions for geometries ranging from a single-pin cell to a full core. MCS was also validated by comparing with results of reactor zero-power physics tests in a full-core simulation. MCS exhibits an excellent consistency against the measured data with a bias of ±3 pcm at the initial criticality whole-core problem. Furthermore, MCS solutions for rod worth are consistent with measured data, and reasonable agreement is obtained for the isothermal temperature coefficient and soluble boron worth. This favorable comparison with measured parameters exhibited by MCS continues to broaden its validation basis. These results provide confidence in MCS's capability in high-fidelity calculations for practical PWR cores.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.1279-1288
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• 2019

The vortex-type fluidic diode (FD) is a key safety component for inherent safety in various advanced reactors such as the sodium fast reactor (SFR) and the molten salt reactor (MSR). In this study, topology optimization is conducted to optimize the design of the vortex-type fluidic diode. The optimization domain is simplified to 2-dimensional geometry for a tangential port and chamber. As a result, a design with a circular chamber and a restrictor at the tangential port is obtained. To verify the new design, experimental study and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis were conducted for inlet Reynolds numbers between 2000 and 6000. However, the results show that the performance of the new design is no better than the original reference design. To analyze the cause of this result, detailed analysis is performed on the velocity and pressure field using flow visualization experiments and 3-D CFD analysis. The results show that the discrepancy between the optimization results in 2-D and the experimental results in 3-D originated from exclusion of an important pressure loss contributor in the optimization process. This study also concludes that the junction design of the axial port and chamber offers potential for improvement of fluidic diode performance.