• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제35권5호
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• pp.497-505
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• 2003

This paper describes a computational approach to the quantification of primary damage under irradiation and demonstrates the effect of neutron energy spectra on the formation of the displacement cascade. The development of displacement cascades in ${\alpha}-Iron$ has been simulated using the MOLDY code - a molecular dynamics code for simulating radiation damage. The primary knock-on atom energy, key input to the MOLDY code, was determined from the SPECTER code calculation on two neutron spectra. The two neutron spectra include; (i) neutron spectrum in the instrumented irradiation capsule of the high-flux advanced neutron application reactor (HANARO), and (ii) neutron spectrum at the inner surface of the reactor pressure vessel steel for the Younggwang nuclear power plant No.5 (YG 5). Minor differences in the normalized neutron spectra between the two spectra produce similar values of PKA energy, which are 4.7 keV for HANARO and 5.3 keV for YG 5. This similarity implies that primary damage to the components of the commercial nuclear reactors should be well simulated by irradiation in the HANARO. Moreover, the application of the MD calculations corroborates this statement by comparing cascades simulation results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제41권3호
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• pp.307-318
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• 2009

KAERI (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) has developed the GAMMA+ code for a thermo-fluid and safety analysis of a VHTR (Very High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor). A key safety issue of the VHTR design is to demonstrate its inherent safety features for an automatic reactor power trip and power stabilization during an anticipated transient without scram (ATWS) accident such as a loss of forced cooling by a trip of the helium circulator (LOFC) or a reactivity insertion by a control rod withdrawal (CRW). This paper intends to show the ATWS assessment capability of the GAMMA+ code which can simulate the reactor power response by solving the point-kinetic equations with six-group delayed neutrons, by considering the reactivity changes due to the effects of a core temperature variation, xenon transients, and reactivity insertions. The present benchmark calculations are performed by using the safety demonstration experiments of the 10 MW high temperature gas cooled-test module (HTR-10) in China. The calculation results of the power response transients and the solid core temperature behavior are compared with the experimental data of a LOFC ATWS test and two CRW ATWS tests by using a 1mk-control rod and a 5mk-control rod, respectively. The GAMMA+ code predicts the power response transients very well for the LOFC and CRW ATWS tests in HTR-10.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제41권3호
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• pp.327-334
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• 2009

Elastic wave is one of the most useful tools for non-destructive tests in nuclear power plants. Since the elastic properties are indispensable for analyzing the behaviors of elastic waves, they should be predetermined within an acceptable accuracy. Nuclear power plants are exposed to harsh environmental conditions and hence the structures are degraded. It means that the Young's modulus becomes unreliable and in-situ measurement of Young's modulus is required from an engineering point of view. Young's modulus is estimated from the group velocity of propagating waves. Because the flexural wave of a plate is inherently dispersive, the group velocity is not clearly evaluated in temporal signal analysis. In order to overcome such ambiguity in estimation of group velocity, Wigner-Ville distribution as the time-frequency analysis technique was proposed and utilized. To verify the proposed method, experiments for steel and acryl plates were performed with accelerometers. The results show good estimation of the Young's modulus of two plates.

• 한국유체기계학회 논문집
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• 제19권2호
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• pp.49-54
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• 2016

A conceptual study of an air-cooled heat exchanger is conducted to achieve the long-term passive cooling of an integral reactor. A newly designed air-cooled heat exchanger is introduced in the present study and preliminary thermal sizing is demonstrated. This study mainly focuses on feasibility of an innovative air-cooled heat exchanger to extend the cooling period of the passive residual heat removal system(PRHRS) only in passive manners. A vertical shell-and-tube air-cooled heat exchanger is installed at the top of the emergency cooldown tank(ECT) to collect evaporated steam into condensate, which enables water inventory of the ECT to be kept. Finally, thermal sizing of an air-cooled heat exchanger is presented. The length and the number of tubes required, and also the height of a stack are calculated to remove the designated heat duty. The present study will contribute to an enhancement of the passive safety system of an integral reactor.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제43권4호
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• pp.343-354
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• 2011

It is critically important to identify unexpected loose parts in a nuclear reactor pressure vessel, since they may collide with and cause damage to internal structures. Mass estimation can provide key information regarding the kind as well as the location of loose parts. This study proposes a mass estimation method based on an artificial neural network (ANN), which can overcome several unresolved issues involved in other conventional methods. In the ANN model, input parameters are the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the auto-power spectrum density (APSD) of the measured impact acceleration signal. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated through application to a large-sized plate and a 1/8-scaled mockup of a reactor pressure vessel. The results are compared with those obtained using a conventional method, the frequency ratio (FR) method. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of estimating the impact mass with 30% lower relative error than the FR method, thus improving the estimation performance.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제37권6호
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• pp.587-594
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• 2005

In an effort to develop a thermal-hydraulic (TH) safety analysis code for Gas-cooled Reactors (GCRs), the MARS code, which was primarily developed for TH analysis of water reactor systems, has been extended here for application to GCRs. The modeling requirements of the system code were derived from a review of major processes and phenomena that are expected to occur during normal and accident conditions of GCRs. Models fur code improvement were then identified through a review of existing MARS code capability. Among these, the following priority models necessary fur the analysis of limiting high and low pressure conduction cooling events were evaluated and incorporated in MARS-GCR/V1 : 1) Helium (He) and Carbon Dioxide ($CO_2$) as main system fluids, 2) gas convection heat transfer, 3) radiation heat transfer, and 4) contact heat transfer models. Each model has been assessed using various conceptual problems for code-to-code benchmarks and it was demonstrated that MARS-GCR/V1 is capable of capturing the relevant phenomena. This paper describes the models implemented in MARS-GCR/V1 and their verification and validation results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제55권4호
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• pp.1528-1539
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• 2023

Since the leakage of sodium in an SFR (sodium-cooled fast reactor) causes an explosion upon reaction with air and water, sodium leakages represent an important safety issue. In this study, a novel technique for improving the reliability of sodium leakage detection applying DDVR (dynamic data validation and reconciliation) is proposed and verified to resolve this technical issue. DDVR is an approach that aims to improve the accuracy of a target system in a dynamic state by minimizing random errors, such as from the uncertainty of instruments and the surrounding environment, and by eliminating gross errors, such as instrument failure, miscalibration, or aging, using the spatial redundancy of measurements in a physical model and the reliability information of the instruments. DDVR also makes it possible to estimate the state of unmeasured points. To validate this approach for supporting sodium leakage detection, this study applies experimental data from a sodium leakage detection experiment performed by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. The validation results show that the reliability of sodium leakage detection is improved by cooperation between DDVR and hardware measurements. Based on these findings, technology integrating software and hardware approaches is suggested to improve the reliability of sodium leakage detection by presenting the expected true state of the system.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.41-49
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• 1985

1,300 MWe 가압경수로 공동내에서 중성자의 흐름해석이 수행되었다. 중성자의 흐름을 해석하는데는 1차원 수송코드인 ANISN, 2차원 수송코드인 DOT3.5, 3차원 Monte Carlo 코드인 TRIPOLI-02와 이들을 접속시켜주는 DOTTRI 등의 전산코드가 이용되었고, 본 계산에 사용된 전산기는 IBM 3033형이었다. 계산된 선속 및 선량율은 900 MW 가압경수로의 공동내에서 측정한 측정치와 비교검토 되었고, 그 결과 중성자 군별로 약간의 오차는 있었으나 전체적으로 큰 오차는 없었다. 이 결과는 대용량의 원자로 차폐설계, 원자로보수시, 기타 원자로 공동내에 출입할 경우에 방사선방어상 필요한 방어수단을 제공하는데 기여하였다.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제38권1호
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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.

• 한국전산유체공학회지
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• 제17권4호
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• pp.1-8
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• 2012

During a reactor normal operation, two parallel 50% capacity cooling pumps circulate primary coolant to remove the fission reaction heat of the reactor through heat exchangers cold by a cooling tower. When one pump is failure, the other pump shall continuously circulate the coolant to remove the residual heat generated by the fuels loaded in the reactor after reactor shutdown. It is necessary to estimate how much flow rate will be supplied to remove the residual heat. We carried out a flow network analysis for the parallel primary pumps based on the piping network of the primary cooling system in HANARO. As result, it is estimated that the flow rate of one pump increased about 1.33 times the rated flow of one pump and was maintained within the limit of the cavitation critical flow.