• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.84-88
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• 2014

A long term passive cooling system is considered as the most important safety feature for the nuclear design after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011. The conventional active pump driven safety systems are not available during a station Black Out (SBO) accident. The current design requirement on cooling time of the Passive Auxiliarly Feedwater System (PAFS) is about 8 hours only. To meet the 72 hours cooling time, the pool capacity of cooling water tank should be increased as much as 3~4 times larger than that of current water cooling tank. In order to extend the cooling time for 72 hours, a new passive air-water combined cooling system is proposed. This paper provides the feasibility of the combined passive air-water cooling system. The current pool capacity of water cooling system is preserved, and the cooling capability is extended by an additional air cooler.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the SAREK Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.1385-1390
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• 2009

In this study the purpose is development of passive cooling system for telecommunication cabinet used by latent heat material. This cooling system is not required for electronic power. It was tested for the performance of the telecommunication combined latent heat material with $48^{\circ}C$ of phase changed temperature and heat pipe. At $45^{\circ}C$ of outside temperature, when heater power was 1,000 W and 1,500 W, the inside temperature of the cabinet was $55^{\circ}C$ and $62^{\circ}C$. This system was showed better performance than the other systems.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.7
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• pp.2438-2446
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• 2023

To cool down a nuclear reactor core and prevent the fuel damage without a pump-driven active component during any anticipated accident, the passive emergency core cooling system (PECCS) was designed and adopted in an advanced light water reactor, i-POWER. In this study, for a validation of the cooling capability of PECCS, thermal-hydraulic integral effect tests were performed with the ATLAS facility by simulating intermediate and small break loss-of-coolant accidents (IBLOCA and SBLOCA). The test result showed that PECCS could effectively depressurize the reactor coolant system by supplying the safety injection water from the safety injection tanks (SITs). The result pointed out that the safety injection from IRWST should have been activated earlier to inhibit the excessive core heat-up. The sequence of the PECCS injection and the major thermal hydraulic transient during the SBLOCA transient was similar to the result of the IBLOCA test with the equivalent PECCS condition. The test data can be used to evaluate the capability of thermal hydraulic safety analysis codes in predicting IBLOCA and SBLOCA transients under an operation of passive safety system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.12
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• pp.4335-4349
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• 2023

Nuclear marine propulsion has been emerging as a next generation carbon-free power source, for which proper passive residual heat removal systems (PRHRSs) are needed for long-term safety. In particular, the characteristics of unlimited operation time and compact design are crucial in maritime applications due to the difficulties of safety aids and limited space. Accordingly, a compact and long-term-operable PRHRS has been proposed with the key design concept of using both air cooling and seawater cooling in tandem. To confirm its feasibility, this study conducted system design and a transient analysis in an accident scenario. Design results indicate that seawater cooling can considerably reduce the overall system size, and thus the compact and long-term-operable PRHRS can be realized. Regarding the transient analysis, the Multi-dimensional Analysis of Reactor Safety (MARS-KS) code was used to analyze the system behavior under a station blackout condition. Results show that the proposed design can satisfy the design requirements with a sufficient margin: the coolant temperature reached the safe shutdown condition within 36 h, and the maximum cooling rate did not exceed 40 ℃/h. Lastly, it was assessed that both air cooling and seawater cooling are necessary for achieving long-term operation and compact design.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.7
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• pp.1431-1441
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• 2017

The Fukushima accident reveals the vulnerability of existing active nuclear power plant (NPP) design against prolonged loss of external electricity events. The passive safety system is considered an attractive alternative to cope with this kind of disaster. Also, the passive safety system enhances both the safety and the economics of NPPs. The adoption of a passive safety system reduces the number of active components and can minimize the construction cost of NPPs. In this paper, reflecting on the experience during the development of the APR+ design in Korea, we propose the concept of an innovative Power Reactor (iPower), which is a kind of passive NPP, to enhance safety in a revolutionary manner. The ultimate goal of iPower is to confirm the feasibility of practically eliminating radioactive material release to the environment in all accident conditions. The representative safety grade passive system includes a passive emergency core cooling system, a passive containment cooling system, and a passive auxiliary feedwater system. Preliminary analysis results show that these concepts are feasible with respect to preventing and/or mitigating the consequences of design base accidents and severe accidents.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.60-72
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• 2019

The air-cooled passive decay heat removal system (APDHR) was proposed to provide the ultimate heat sink for non-LOCA accidents. The APDHR is a modified one of Passive Auxiliary Feed-water system (PAFS) installed in APR+. The PAFS has a heat exchanger in the Passive Condensate Cooling Tank (PCCT) and can remove decay heat for 8 h. After that, the heat transfer rate through the PAFS drastically decreases because the heat transfer condition changes from water to air. The APDHR with a vertical heat exchanger in PCCT will be able to remove the decay heat by air if it has sufficient natural convection in PCCT. We conducted the thermal-hydraulic simulation by the MARS code to investigate the behavior of the APR + selected as a reference plant for the simulation. The simulation contains two phases based on water depletion: the early phase and the late phase. In the early phase, the volume of water in PCCT was determined to avoid the water depletion in three days after shutdown. In the late phase, when the number of the HXs is greater than 4089 per PCCT, the MARS simulation confirmed the long-term cooling by air is possible under extended Station Blackout (SBO).

• Proceeding of Spring/Autumn Annual Conference of KHA
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.323-328
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• 2004

This study measured the thermal environment and residents' cooling behavior of the apartments' living rooms in summer in Seoul. The purpose of this study is to find out the present thermal environment of the living rooms and to find out the target figure of passive cooling system. The surveys and measurements took place in six apartments of Seoul for 60days(2004. 7. 3${\sim}$2004. 8. 31). The result were summarized as follows; The thermal environment of apartments' living rooms were almost neutral, and residents felt a little uncomfortable. Residents turned on the air conditioner at $27.31^{\circ}C$ of indoor temperature, and $28.89^{\circ}C$ of SET*. Therefore, cooling critical temperature of the passive cooling system can be figured out from this result.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.92-98
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• 2018

The flow of cooling water in a passive containment cooling system (PCCS), used to remove heat released in design basis accidents from a concrete containment of light water nuclear power plant, was conducted in order to investigate the thermo-fluid equilibrium among many parallel tubes of PCCS. Numerical simulations of the subcooled boiling flow within a coolant loop of a PCCS, which will be installed in innovative pressurized-water reactor (PWR), were conducted using the commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS-CFX. Shear stress transport (SST) and the RPI model were used for turbulence closure and subcooled flow boiling, respectively. As the first step, the simplified geometry of PCCS with 36 tubes was modeled in order to reduce computational resource. Even and uneven thermal loading conditions were applied at the outer walls of parallel tubes for the simulation of the coolant flow in the PCCS at the initial phase of accident. It was observed that the natural circulation maintained in single-phase for all even and uneven thermal loading cases. For uneven thermal loading cases, coolant velocity in each tube were increased according to the applied heat flux. However, the flows were mixed well in the header and natural circulation of the whole cooling loop was not affected by uneven thermal loading significantly.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.5
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• pp.964-974
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• 2020

The small modular reactors (SMRs) of the integrated pressurized water reactor (IPWR) type have been widely developed owing to their enhanced safety features. The SMR-IPWR adopts passive residual heat removal system (PRHRS) to extract residual heat from the core. Because the PRHRS removes the residual heat using the latent heat of the water stored in the emergency cooldown tank, the PRHRS gradually loses its cooling capacity after the stored water is depleted. A quick restoration of the power supply is expected infeasible under station blackout accident condition, so an advanced PRHRS is needed to ensure an extended grace period. In this study, an advanced design is proposed to indirectly incorporate a dry air cooling tower to the PRHRS through an intermediate loop called indefinite PRHRS. The feasibility of the indefinite PRHRS was assessed through a long-term transient simulation using the MARS-KS code. The indefinite PRHRS is expected to remove the residual heat without depleting the stored water. The effect of the environmental temperature on the indefinite PRHRS was confirmed by parametric analysis using comparative simulations with different environmental temperatures.