• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제28권3호
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• pp.331-338
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• 1996

In the thermal-hydraulic design, the effect of fuel rod bow is quantified tv the rod bow DNBR penalty which is a key design parameter to assure the coolability of fuel assembly in the pressurized water reactor. In this work, a computer program for the evaluation of the rod bow DNBR penalty based on Westinghouse methodology is developed and its application procedure is proposed. The computer simulation is based on the Monte-Carlo method. The qualification of developed computer program is performed by a comparison of calculational result with that given by Westinghouse's document. A new application procedure is built using batch mean and batch standard deviation. The normality of sample population generated by the batch calculation is confirmed by means of a chi-square test for goodness of fit. On the view point of statistics it is effected that the more reliable design value may be produced by the new application procedure.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제53권10호
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• pp.3264-3274
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• 2021

In a severe accident of light water reactor (LWR), molten core material (corium) can be released into the wet cavity, and a fuel-coolant interaction (FCI) can occur. The molten jet with high speed is broken and fragmented into small debris, which may cause a steam explosion or a molten core concrete interaction (MCCI). Since the premixing stage where the jet breakup occurs has a large impact on the severe accident progression, the understanding and evaluation of the jet breakup phenomenon are highly important. Therefore, in this study, the jet breakup simulations were performed using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method which is a particle-based Lagrangian numerical method. For the multi-fluid system, the normalized density approach and improved surface tension model (CSF) were applied to the in-house SPH code (single GPU-based SOPHIA code) to improve the calculation accuracy at the interface of fluids. The jet breakup simulations were conducted in two cases: (1) jet breakup without structures, and (2) jet breakup with structures (control rod guide tubes). The penetration depth of the jet and jet breakup length were compared with those of the reference experiments, and these SPH simulation results are qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the experiments.

• 시스템엔지니어링학술지
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• 제19권2호
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• pp.46-58
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• 2023

Deterministic safety analysis is a crucial part of safety assessment, particularly when it comes to demonstrating the safety of nuclear power plant designs. The traditional approach to deterministic safety analysis models is to model the nuclear core using point kinetics. However, this simplified approach does not fully reflect the real core behavior with proper moderator and fuel reactivity feedbacks during the transient. The use of Multi-Physics approach allows more precise simulation reflecting the inherent three-dimensionality (3D) of the problem by representing the detailed 3D core, with instantaneous updates of feedback mechanisms due to changes of important reactivity parameters like fuel temperature coefficient (FTC) and moderator temperature coefficient (MTC). This paper addresses a CEA ejection accident at hot full power (HFP), in which the underlying strong and un-symmetric feedback between thermal-hydraulics and reactor kinetics exist. For this purpose, a multi-physics analysis tool has been selected with the nodal kinetics code, 3DKIN, implicitly coupled to the thermal-hydraulic code, RELAP5, for real-time communication and data exchange. This coupled approach enables high fidelity three-dimensional simulation and is therefore especially relevant to reactivity initiated accident (RIA) scenarios and power distribution anomalies with strong feedback mechanisms and/or un-symmetrical characteristics as in the CEA ejection accident. The Systems Engineering approach is employed to provide guidance in developing the work in a systematic and efficient fashion.

• 한국원자력학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국원자력학회 1997년도 춘계학술발표회논문집(1)
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• pp.374-379
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• 1997

The thermal margin of CANDU-6 reactor is estimated by the CCP, which is dependent on fuel channel hydraulics and the CHF of fuel bundle. This paper intents to describe the characteristics of CCP behavior for the CANDU-6 channel in which CANFLEX-NU fuel bundles are assumed to be loaded. Also, it includes the thermal margin evaluation of the CANDU-6 channel loaded with a mixed CANFLEX-NU and 37-element fuel bundles as a simulation of the partial loading of CANFLEX-NU fuel bundle in the CANDU-6 reactor. For the mixed fuel channels, the effects of axial flux distribution(AFD) on CCP were investigated by using the AFD tilted in the downstream. The CCP of CANFLEX-NU fuel bundle was found to be improved by the CHF enhancement, despite of the slight flow decrease, in case of both full and partial loading, compared with those of a standard 37-element fuel bundle.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제50권7호
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• pp.1148-1153
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• 2018

The Leaking Fuel Experiment test facility was designed to simulate the activity release from spent leaking fuel rods under steady state and transient conditions in the spent fuel pool. The experimental rig included an electrically heated fuel rod with different defects and a cooling system. The fission product transport was simulated by potassium-chloride. The conductivity changes of the water in the cooling system were measured to provide information about the amount of released solution. Defects of different sizes and positions were applied, together with a wide range of rod powers to simulate decay heat. The produced data can be used for predicting the activity release from leaking fuel under storage conditions and for the interpretation of fuel examination procedures.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제41권8호
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• pp.1109-1114
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• 2009

The evolution of a high burnup structure (HBS) in a light water reactor (LWR) $UO_2$ fuel was simulated using the Potts model. A simulation system for the Potts model was defined as a two-dimensional triangular lattice, for which the stored energy was calculated from both the irradiation damage of the $UO_2$ matrix and the formation of a grain boundary in the newly recrystallized small HBS grains. In the simulation, the evolution probability of the HBS is calculated by the system energy difference between before and after the Monte Carlo simulation step. The simulated local threshold burnup for the HBS formation was 62 MWd/kgU, consistent with the observed threshold burnup range of 60-80 MWd/kgU. The simulation revealed that the HBS was heterogeneously nucleated on the intergranular bubbles in the proximity of the threshold burnup and then additionally on the intragranular bubbles for a burnup above 86 MWd/kgU. In addition, the simulation carried out under a condition of no bubbles indicated that the bubbles played an important role in lowering the threshold burnup for the HBS formation, thereby enabling the HBS to be observed in the burnup range of conventional high burnup fuels.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권10호
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• pp.3943-3948
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• 2022

Single-photon emission computed tomography is one of the reliable pin-by-pin verification techniques for spent-fuel assemblies. One of the challenges with this technique is to increase the total fuel assembly verification speed while maintaining high verification accuracy. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm-based tomographic image analysis technique for partial-defect verification of fuel assemblies. With the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation technique, a tomographic image dataset consisting of 511 fuel-rod patterns of a 3 × 3 fuel assembly was generated, and with these images, the VGG16, GoogLeNet, and ResNet models were trained. According to an evaluation of these models for different training dataset sizes, the ResNet model showed 100% pattern estimation accuracy. And, based on the different tomographic image qualities, all of the models showed almost 100% pattern estimation accuracy, even for low-quality images with unrecognizable fuel patterns. This study verified that an AI model can be effectively employed for accurate and fast partial-defect verification of fuel assemblies.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제52권10호
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• pp.2394-2401
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• 2020

Octadecylamine is an effective film-forming amine that protects carbon steel from corrosion. In the present study, the effect of octadecylamine concentration on adsorption on a carbon steel surface was investigated in anaerobic alkaline solution by using SEM/EDS, TEM and the Materials Studio simulation techniques. TEM morphology observation and EDS elemental detection determine the thicknesses of octadecylamine film on a carbon steel surface, which are confirmed by the in-situ electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurement and resistance calculation. The Materials Studio simulation reveals the number of octadecylamine film layers at different concentrations. Results obtained in this study indicate that adsorption of octadecylamine film on carbon steel proceeds with the multi-layer adsorption mechanism.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제51권2호
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• pp.384-393
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• 2019

An experimental validation of a nuclear forensics methodology for the source reactor-type discrimination of separated weapons-useable plutonium is presented. The methodology uses measured values of intra-element isotope ratios of plutonium and fission product contaminants. MCNP radiation transport codes were used for various reactor core modeling and fuel burnup simulations. A reactor-dependent library of intra-element isotope ratio values as a function of burnup and time since irradiation was created from the simulation results. The experimental validation of the methodology was achieved by performing two low-burnup experimental irradiations, resulting in distinct fuel samples containing sub-milligram quantities of weapons-useable plutonium. The irradiated samples were subjected to gamma and mass spectrometry to measure several intra-element isotope ratios. For each reactor in the library, a maximum likelihood calculation was utilized to compare the measured and simulated intra-element isotope ratio values, producing a likelihood value which is proportional to the probability of observing the measured ratio values, given a particular reactor in the library. The measured intra-element isotope ratio values of both irradiated samples and its comparison with the simulation predictions using maximum likelihood analyses are presented. The analyses validate the nuclear forensics methodology developed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.36-48
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• 2022

As a valid numerical method to obtain a high-resolution result of a flow field, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been widely used to study coolant flow and heat transfer characteristics in fuel rod bundles. However, the time-consuming, iterative calculation of Navier-Stokes equations makes CFD unsuitable for the scenarios that require efficient simulation such as sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification. To solve this problem, a reduced-order model (ROM) based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and machine learning (ML) is proposed to simulate the flow field efficiently. Firstly, a validated CFD model to output the flow field data set of the rod bundle is established. Secondly, based on the POD method, the modes and corresponding coefficients of the flow field were extracted. Then, an deep feed-forward neural network, due to its efficiency in approximating arbitrary functions and its ability to handle high-dimensional and strong nonlinear problems, is selected to build a model that maps the non-linear relationship between the mode coefficients and the boundary conditions. A trained surrogate model for modes coefficients prediction is obtained after a certain number of training iterations. Finally, the flow field is reconstructed by combining the product of the POD basis and coefficients. Based on the test dataset, an evaluation of the ROM is carried out. The evaluation results show that the proposed POD-ROM accurately describe the flow status of the fluid field in rod bundles with high resolution in only a few milliseconds.