Validation of the ATHLET-SC code by trans-critical transient data

Abstract

Abstract For the safety analysis of Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactor (SCWR), one of the challenge tasks is to predict the trans-critical behavior of the reactor system during some accidents. The current safety codes have some shortcomings when the pressure decreases from the supercritical condition to the subcritical state due to the void fraction discontinuity across the critical point. Another challenge is the validation of the system code, which needs the transient experimental data. To overcome the above-mentioned challenges, this paper validates the modified code ATHLET-SC, which is developed based on the pseudo two-phase method. The trans-critical transient data from SWAMUP test facility in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) are adopted to compare with the simulation results. The results obtained so far shows that the ATHLET-SC code has good feasibility to the trans-critical simulation of SCWR, and it can be used for transient analysis of SCWR in the future.