• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.27 no.3
• /
• pp.393-402
• /
• 1995

The structural analysis of the reactor coolant system mainly consist of too fields. The one is the static analysis considering the impact of pressure and temperature built up during normal operation. The other is the dynamic analysis to estimate the impact of postulated events such as the seismic loads or postulated branch line pipe breaks event. Since the most important goal of the RCS structural analysis is to prove the safety of the RCS during normal operation or postulated events, a widely proven theory having enough conservatism is adopted. The load occurring on the RCS during normal operation is considered as the basic design loading condition throughout whole plant life time. The most typical characteristic of the RCS during normal operation is the thermal expansion of the RCS caused by reactor coolant with high temperature and pressure. Therefore, the exact estimation on the thermal movement of the RCS is needed to get more clear understanding on the thermal movement behavior of the RCS. In this study, the general structural analysis concept and modeling method to evaluate the thermal movement of the RCS under the normal plant operation condition are presented. To discuss the validation of the suggested analysis, analysis results are compared with the measured data which ore referred from the standardized 1000 MWe PWR plant under construction.