Thermal-Hydraulic Analysis of SWAMUP Facility Using ATHLET-SC Code

Abstract

During the loss of coolant accident (LOCA) of supercritical water cooled reactor (SCWR), the pressure in the reactor system will undergo a rapid decrease from the supercritical pressure to the subcritical condition. This process is called trans-critical transients, which is of crucial importance for the LOCA analysis of SCWR. In order to simulate the trans-critical transient, a number of system codes for SCWR have been developed up to date. However, the validation work for the trans-critical models in these codes is still missing. The test facility Supercritical WAter MUltiPurpose loop (SWAMUP) with 2×2 rod bundle in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) will be applied to provide test data for code validation. Some pre-test calculations are important and necessary to show the feasibility of the experiment. In this study, trans-critical transient analysis is performed for the SWAMUP facility with the system code ATHLET-SC, which is modified in SJTU, for supercritical water system. This paper presents the system behavior e.g. system pressure, coolant mass flow, cladding temperature during the depressurization. The effects of some important parameters such as heating power, depressurization rate on the system characteristics are also investigated in this paper. Additionally, some sensitivities study of the code models, e.g. heat transfer coefficient, CHF correlation, are analyzed and discussed. The results indicate that the revised system code ATHLET-SC is capable of simulating thermal hydraulic behavior during the trans-critical transient. According to the results, the cladding temperature during the transient is kept at a low value. However, the pressure difference of the heat exchanger after depressurization could reach 6 MPa, which should be considered in the experiment.