• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.55 no.9
• /
• pp.3164-3182
• /
• 2023

The CRUD on the fuel cladding under the pressurized water reactor (PWR) operating condition causes several issues. The CRUD can act as thermal resistance and increases the local cladding temperature which accelerate the corrosion process. The hideout of boron inside the CRUD results in axial offset anomaly and reduces the plant's shutdown margin. Recently, there are efforts to revise the acceptance criteria of emergency core cooling systems (ECCS), and additionally require the modeling of the thermal resistance effect of the CRUD during the performance analysis. There is an urgent need for the evaluation of the effect of the CRUD deposition on the cladding heat transfer under PWR operating conditions, but the experimental database is very limited. The experimental facility called DISNY was designed and constructed to analyze the CRUD-related multi-physical phenomena, and the performance analysis of the constructed DISNY facility was conducted. The thermal-hydraulic and water chemistry conditions to simulate the CRUD growth under PWR operating conditions were established. The design characteristics and feasibility of the DISNY facility were validated by the MARS-KS code analysis and separate performance tests. In the current study, detailed design features, design validation results, and future utilization plans of the proposed DISNY facility are presented.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.109-116
• /
• 2023

This study presents a CRUD modelling to simulate the thermal resistance behavior of CRUD, deposited on the surface of a cladding tube of a fuel assembly. When heat produced from fuels transfers to a coolant through a cladding tube, the CRUD acting as an additional thermal resistance is expressed as two layers, i.e., a solid oxide layer and an imaginary fluid layer, which are added to the experimental tube's heat structure of the MARS-KS input data. The validation calculation for the experiments performed in UNIST-DISNY facility showed that the center and surface temperatures of the cladding tube increased as the porosity and the steam amount inside pores of the CRUD got higher. In addition, the temperature gradient in the imaginary fluid layer was calculated to be larger than that in the solid oxide part, indicating that the steam amount inside the layer acted more largely as thermal resistance. It was also evaluated through sensitivity calculations that the cladding tube temperature was more sensitive to the CRUD porosity and the steam amount in pores than to the inlet flow rate of the coolant.