PWR safety/relief valve blowdown analysis experience

Abstract

The paper describes the difficulties encountered in analyzing a PWR primary loop pressurizer safety relief valve and power operated relief valve discharge system, as well as their resolution. The experience is based on the use of RELAP5/MOD1 and TPIPE computer programs as the tools for fluid transient analysis and piping dynamic analysis, respectively. General approaches for generating forcing functions from thermalfluid analysis solution to be used in the dynamic analysis of piping are reviewed. The paper demonstrates that the “acceleration or wave force” method may have numerical difficulties leading to unrealistic, large amplitude, highly oscillatory forcing functions in the vicinity of severe flow area discontinuities or choking junctions when low temperature loop seal water is discharged. To avoid this problem, an alternate computational method based on the direct force method may be used. The simplicity and superiority in numerical stability of the forcing function computation method as well as its drawback are discussed. Additionally, RELAP modeling for piping, valve, reducer, and sparger is discussed. The effects of loop seal temperature on SRV and PORV discharge line blowdown forces, pressure and temperature distributions are examined. Finally, the effects of including support stiffness and support eccentricity in piping analysis models, method and modeling relief tank connections, minimization of tank nozzle loads, use of damping factors, and selection of solution time steps are discussed.