Spray effect on the behavior of hydrogen during severe accidents by a loss-of-coolant in the APR1400 containment

Abstract

In order to analyze the effects of the spray activation on the behavior of steam and hydrogen which are produced in the reactor vessel and released into the containment of the APR1400 nuclear power plant during hypothetical severe loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCA), the 3-dimensional CFD code GASFLOW was used. For the two-phase flow with a gas mixture and spray droplets, GASFLOW solves a homogeneous two-phase model which was validated in this study by simulating one of the TOSQAN experiments. The results of the GASFLOW analyses for the LOCAs in the APR1400 show that the spray system can affect the hydrogen distributions in the containment by condensing the steam and it is important to control the spray system carefully during an accident from a hydrogen safety aspect.