Overview of the independent ASTEC V2.0 validation by SARNET partners

Abstract

Significant efforts are put into the assessment of the severe accident integral code ASTEC, jointly developed since several years by IRSN and GRS, either through comparison with results of the most important international experiments or through benchmarks with other severe accident simulation codes on plant applications. These efforts are done in first priority by the code developers’ organisations, IRSN and GRS, and also by numerous partners, in particular in the frame of the SARNET European network.The first version of the new series ASTEC V2 had been released in July 2009 to SARNET partners. Two subsequent V2.0 code revisions, including several modelling improvements, have been then released to the same partners, respectively in 2010 and 2011.This paper summarises first the approach of ASTEC validation vs. experiments, along with a description of the validation matrix, and presents then a few examples of applications of the ASTEC V2.0-rev1 version carried out in 2011 by the SARNET users. These calculation examples are selected in a way to cover diverse aspects of severe accident phenomenology, i.e. to cover both in-vessel and ex-vessel processes, in order to provide a good picture of the current ASTEC V2 capabilities. Finally, the main lessons drawn from this joint validation task are summarised, along with an evaluation of the current physical modelling relevance and thus an identification of the ASTEC V2.0 validity domain.