• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.542-550
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• 1996

Nuclear ship reactors have several features different from land-based PWR's. Especially, effects of ship motions on reactor thermal-hydraulics and good load following capability for abrupt load changes are essential characteristics of nuclear ship reactors. This study modified the RETRAN-03 to analyze the thermal-hydraulic transients under three-dimensional ship motions, named RETRAN-03/MOV in order to apply to future marine reactors. First Japanese nuclear ship MUTSU reactor have been analyzed under various ship motions to verify this code. Calculations have been peformed under rolling, heaving and stationary inclination conditions during normal operation. Also, the natural circulation has been analyzed, which can provide the decay heat removal to ensure the passive safety of marine reactors. As results, typical thermal-hydraulic characteristics of marine reactors such as flow rate oscillations and S/G water level oscillations have been successfully simulated at various conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.54-59
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• 2019

The main objective of nuclear reactor safety is to maintain the nuclear fuel in a thermally safe condition with enough safety margins during normal operation and anticipated operational occurrences. In this research, core flow bypass is studied under the conditions of the unavailability of safety systems. As core bypass occurs, the core flow rate is assumed to decrease exponentially with a time constant of 25 s to new steady state values of 20, 40, 60, and 80% of the nominal core flow rate. The thermal hydraulic code PARET is used through these calculations. Reactor thermal hydraulic stability is reported for all cases of core flow bypass.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.581-588
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• 2013

This paper deals with the Safety Analysis for $CANDU^{(R)}$ 6 nuclear reactors as affected by main Heat Transport System (HTS) aging. Operational and aging related changes of the HTS throughout its lifetime may lead to restrictions in certain safety system settings and hence some restriction in performance under certain conditions. A step in confirming safe reactor operation is the tracking of relevant data and their corresponding interpretation by the use of appropriate thermal-hydraulic analytic models. Safety analyses ranging from the assessment of safety limits associated with the prevention of intermittent fuel sheath dryout for a slow Loss of Regulation (LOR) analysis and fission gas release after a fuel failure are summarized. Specifically for fission gas release, the thermal-hydraulic analysis for a fresh core and an 11 Effective Full Power Years (EFPY) aged core was summarized, leading to the most severe stagnation break sizes for the inlet feeder break and the channel failure time. Associated coolant conditions provide the input data for fuel analyses. Based on the thermal-hydraulic data, the fission product inventory under normal operating conditions may be calculated for both fresh and aged cores, and the fission gas release may be evaluated during the transient. This analysis plays a major role in determining possible radiation doses to the public after postulated accidents have occurred.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.91-102
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• 2015

A thermal-hydraulic design and performance analysis computer code for a once-through steam generator using straight tubes is developed. To benchmark the developed physical models and computer code, an once-through steam generator developed by other designer is simulated and the calculated results are compared with the design data. Also, the same steam generator is analyzed with the best-estimate thermal-hydraulic system code, MARS, for the code-to-code validation. The overall characteristics of heat transfer area, pressure and temperature distributions calculated by the developed code show general agreements with the published design data as well as the analysis results of MARS. It is demonstrated that the developed code can be utilized for diverse purposes, such as, sensitivity analyses and optimum thermal design of a once-through steam generator.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.541-546
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• 2014

Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) has been widely used to estimate the overall safety of nuclear power plants (NPP) and it provides base information for risk informed application (RIA) and risk informed regulation (RIR). For the effective and correct use of PSA in RIA/RIR related decision making, the risk estimated by a PSA model should be as realistic as possible. In this work, a best-estimate thermal-hydraulic analysis of loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCAs) for the Hanul Nuclear Units 3&4 is first carried out in a systematic way. That is, the behaviors of peak cladding temperature (PCT) were analyzed with various combinations of break sizes, the operating conditions of safety systems, and the operator's action time for aggressive secondary cooling. Thereafter, the results of the thermal-hydraulic analysis have been reflected in the improvement of the PSA model by changing both accident sequences and success criteria of the event trees for the LOCA scenarios.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.6
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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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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.402-409
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• 2019

When a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) occurs in a nuclear power plant, accident scenarios which can prevent core damage are defined based on break size. Current probabilistic safety assessment evaluates that core damage can be prevented under small-break LOCA (SBLOCA) and steam generator tube rupture (SGTR) with rapid cool down (RCD) strategy when all safety injection systems are unavailable. However, previous research has pointed out a limitation of RCD in terms of initiation time. Therefore, RCD success criteria estimation based on allowable coping time under a SBLOCA or SGTR when all safety injection systems are unavailable was performed based on time-line and thermal-hydraulic analyses. The time line analysis assumed a single emergency operating procedure flow, and the thermal hydraulic analysis utilized MARS-KS code with variables of break size, cooling rate, and operator allowable time. Results show while RCD is possible under SGTR, it is impossible under SBLOCA at the APR1400's current cooling rate limitation of 55 K/hr. A success criteria map for RCD under SBLOCA is suggested without cooling rate limitation.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.985-996
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• 2000

The issue of quench is related to safety operation of large-scale superconducting magnet system fabricated by cable-in-conduit conductor. A numerical method is presented to simulate the thermal hydraulic quench characteristics in the superconducting Tokamak magnet system, One-dimensional fluid dynamic equations for supercritical helium and the equation of heat conduction for the conduit are used to describe the thermal hydraulic characteristics in the cable-in-conduit conductor. The high heat transfer approximation between supercritical helium and superconducting strands is taken into account due to strong heating induced flow of supercritical helium. The fully implicit time integration of upwind scheme for finite volume method is utilized to discretize the equations on the staggered mesh. The scheme of a new adaptive mesh is proposed for the moving boundary problem and the time term is discretized by the-implicit scheme. It remarkably reduces the CPU time by local linearization of coefficient and the compressible storage of the large sparse matrix of discretized equations. The discretized equations are solved by the IMSL. The numerical implement is discussed in detail. The validation of this method is demonstrated by comparison of the numerical results with those of the SARUMAN and the QUENCHER and experimental measurements.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.45 no.7
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• pp.871-894
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• 2013

KAERI (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) has been operating an integral effect test facility, the Advanced Thermal-Hydraulic Test Loop for Accident Simulation (ATLAS), for transient and accident simulations of advanced pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Using ATLAS, a high-quality integral effect test database has been established for major design basis accidents of the APR1400 plant. A Domestic Standard Problem (DSP) exercise using the ATLAS database was promoted to transfer the database to domestic nuclear industries and contribute to improving a safety analysis methodology for PWRs. This $2^{nd}$ ATLAS DSP (DSP-02) exercise aims at an effective utilization of an integral effect database obtained from ATLAS, the establishment of a cooperation framework among the domestic nuclear industry, a better understanding of the thermal hydraulic phenomena, and an investigation into the possible limitation of the existing best-estimate safety analysis codes. A small break loss of coolant accident with a 6-inch break at the cold leg was determined as a target scenario by considering its technical importance and by incorporating interests from participants. This DSP exercise was performed in an open calculation environment where the integral effect test data was open to participants prior to the code calculations. This paper includes major information of the DSP-02 exercise as well as comparison results between the calculations and the experimental data.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.281-288
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• 2003

The MATRA-LMR code has been developed based on a subchannel analysis method for LMR (Liquid Metal Reactor) core subassembly thermal hydraulic design and analysis. The code was improved to allow a seven assembly calculation and can account for inter-assembly heat transfer based on a lumped parameter model. This paper describes the main modifications and improvements of the code and shows reference calculation results which compared single assembly calculation with seven assembly calculation cased for driver and blanket subassemblies of the KALIMER 150 MWe breakeven conceptual design core. KAL- IMER is a pool-type sodium cooled reactor with a thermal output of 392.0 MWth, which have inherently safe, environmentally friendly, proliferation-resistant and economically viable reactor concepts.