Capability of the RELAP5 code to simulate natural circulation behavior in test facilities

Abstract

Many advanced reactor designs incorporate passive systems mainly to enhance the operational safety and possible elimination of severe accident condition. Some reactors are even designed to remove the nominal fission heat passively by natural circulation without using mechanical pumps e.g. ESBWR, AHWR, CHTR, CAREM, etc. while in most other new reactor concepts, the decay heat is removed passively by natural circulation following the pump trip conditions. The design and safety analysis of these reactors are carried out using the best estimate codes such as RELAP5, TRAC and CATHARE, etc. These best estimate codes have been developed for pumped circulation systems and it is not proven about their adequacy or applicability for natural circulation systems wherein the driving mechanism is completely different. Some of the key phenomena which are difficult to model but are significantly important to assess the natural circulation system performances are – low flow natural circulation mainly because the flow is not fully developed and can be multi-dimensional in nature; flow instabilities; critical heat flux under oscillatory condition; flow stratification particularly in large diameter vessel; thermal stratification in large pools; effect of non-condensable gases on condensation, etc. Though, these best estimate codes use a six equation two-fluid model formulation for the thermal-hydraulic calculation which is considered to be the best representative of two-phase flows, but their accuracies depend on the accuracies of the models for interfacial relationships for mass, energy and momentum transfer which are semi-empirical in nature. The other problem with two-fluid models is the effect of ill-posedness which may cause numerical instability. Besides, the numerical diffusion associated due to truncation of higher order terms can affect the prediction of flow instabilities. All these effects may lead to inability to capture the important physical instability in natural circulation systems and instability characteristics i.e. amplitude and frequency of flow oscillation. In view of this, it is essential to test the capability of these codes to simulate natural circulation behavior under single and two-phase flow conditions before applying them to the future reactor concepts.In the present study, one of the extensively used best estimate code RELAP5 has been used for simulation of steady state, transient and stability behavior of natural circulation based experimental facilities, such as the High-Pressure Natural Circulation Loop (HPNCL) and the Parallel Channel Loop (PCL) installed and operating at BARC. The test data have been generated for a range of pressure, power and subcooling conditions. The computer code RELAP5/MOD3.2 was applied to predict the transient natural circulation characteristics under single-phase and two-phase conditions, thresholds of flow instability, amplitude and frequency of flow oscillations for different operating conditions of the loops. This paper presents the effect of nodalisation in prediction of natural circulation behavior in test facilities and a comparison of experimental data in with that of code predictions. The errors associated with the predictions are also characterized.