ICONE19-43654 SIMULATION OF HYDROGEN DEFLAGRATION EXPERIMENTS IN THE ENACCEF FACILITY USING ASTEC CODE

Abstract

During a hypothetic severe accident in the NPP involving degradation of the core of a light water reactor, hydrogen could be generated and released into the containment atmosphere posing a deflagration or even a detonation risk. In the case of deflagration, the integrity of the containment would be threatened by the increase of the containment atmosphere pressure and temperature. Other risks of containment damage due to turbulent flames exist, caused by high pressure pulses, shock waves and etc. For the simulation of such processes a reliable numerical codes are needed. Despite flame acceleration being largely studied for homogeneous hydrogen - air mixtures, there are still unresolved issues in this research area, e.g., the effect of turbulence level on flame acceleration and quenching. This paper presents simulations of hydrogen deflagration experiments in the ENACCEF facility using ASTEC code, performed in the frames of International Standard Program No. 49 and SARNET2 project. Experiments and simulations were performed with the aim of evaluating the codes' (a number of participants with various codes participated in the project) capabilities to simulate hydrogen combustion. ASTEC code is an integral lumped-parameter approach based nuclear safety analysis code. For the presented simulations, ASTEC modules CPA (containment thermohydromechanics) and FRONT (hydrogen deflagration) were used. Paper present ENACCEF test facility, its nodalisation schemes developed for the calculations, simulated experiments and simulations' results. Brief description of FRONT module is also presented. Calculations' results are compared with experimental results and analyzed.