| Summary: | Nuclear reactors with improved safety concepts are currently being studied within the nuclear engineering community, with a focus on passive safety features. One of these reactor concepts is the Very High Temperature gas-cooled Reactor (VHTR) of which the Reactor Cavity Cooling Systems (RCCS) is seen as an integral and crucial part of the passive safety concept. Considerable validation and development of the necessary software tools is required to perform analysis and designs of these future reactor concepts.
The primary objective of this study is to establish a methodology for the creation of an integrated system level process model of a typical air-cooled RCCS in Flownex®, and to illustrate its applicability by simulating different scenarios that illustrate the operational characteristics of such a system. For this purpose, the existing RCCS conceptual design that is being studied by the KAERI was used as the case study.
As a start, selected case studies were performed to verify that the Flownex® models were set up correctly to perform natural circulation flows, both in steady and transient conditions, and with radiation, convection and conduction taking part. These are the major typical physical phenomena in the RCCS. The models were compared with EES (Engineering Equation Solver) models of the same geometries and specifications. There was a good agreement between Flownex® and EES model results.
After this verification, a simulation model of the integrated RCCS system was developed. The Flownex® models were applied to model selected possible operational scenarios. The major observations from the results are that:
- The RCCS carries with it enough heat to the ambient such that the concrete wall temperature is maintained below the benchmark value of 65°C for the different boundary conditions imposed.
- The RCCS maintains its functionality even with three quarters of the risers blocked or in the event that there is a break in one of the chimney pipes. === MIng (Nuclear Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015
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