Verification and improvement of dynamic motion model in MARS for marine reactor thermal-hydraulic analysis under ocean condition

Abstract

Abstract Unlike land-based nuclear power plants, a marine or floating reactor is affected by external forces due to ocean conditions. These external forces can cause additional accelerations and affect each system and equipment of the marine reactor. Therefore, in designing a marine reactor and evaluating its performance and stability, a thermal hydraulic safety analysis code is necessary to consider the thermal hydrodynamic effects of ship motion. MARS, which is a reactor system analysis code, includes a dynamic motion model that can simulate the thermal-hydraulic phenomena under three-dimensional motion by calculating the body force term included in the momentum equation. In this study, it was verified that the dynamic motion model can simulate fluid motion with reasonable accuracy using conceptual problems. In addition, two modifications were made to the dynamic motion model; first, a user-supplied table to simulate a realistic ship motion was implemented, and second, the flow regime map determination algorithm was improved by calculating the volume inclination information at every time step if the dynamic motion model was activated. With these modifications, MARS could simulate the thermal-hydraulic phenomena under ocean motion more realistically.