Development of a thermal–hydraulic analysis code for research reactors with plate fuels

Abstract

The thermal–hydraulic analysis code THAC-PRR has been developed with Visual Fortran 6.5 for the investigation of plate type fuel reactors. It is based on the fundamental conservation of mass, momentum and energy, and proper constitutive correlations for flow friction factor, heat transfer and thermophysical properties. Moreover, a simple and improved lumped-differential method has been adopted to analyze the conjugate heat transfer between the fuel plate and the coolant. The Reactivity Insertion Accident (RIA) and Loss Of Flow Accident (LOFA), which have been defined in the IAEA 10 MW MTR Benchmark program, were analyzed with this developed program for the code-to-code validation. Good agreement was achieved. Furthermore, the accidents due to the partial (95%) and total (100%) blockage of one channel in the IAEA 10 MW MTR were investigated with THAC-PRR. The results showed that if the blockage occurred in the average channel, there was no boiling occurred even the channel was totally obstructed. The reason was that the heat was transferred to the adjacent channels by conduction through the fuel plates which formed the obstructed channel. However, if the blockage occurred in the hot channel, boiling did occur. This indicated that it is very important to consider the interaction between the blocked channel and the adjacent channels in this type of transient.