Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Application of CUPID for subchannel-scale thermal-hydraulic analysis of pressurized water reactor core under single-phase conditions

  • Yoon, Seok Jong (Seoul National University, Department of Nuclear Engineering) ;
  • Kim, Seul Been (Seoul National University, Department of Nuclear Engineering) ;
  • Park, Goon Cherl (Seoul National University, Department of Nuclear Engineering) ;
  • Yoon, Han Young (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) ;
  • Cho, Hyoung Kyu (Seoul National University, Department of Nuclear Engineering)
  • Received : 2017.05.12
  • Accepted : 2017.09.26
  • Published : 2018.02.25
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Abstract

There have been recent efforts to establish methods for high-fidelity and multi-physics simulation with coupled thermal-hydraulic (T/H) and neutronics codes for the entire core of a light water reactor under accident conditions. Considering the computing power necessary for a pin-by-pin analysis of the entire core, subchannel-scale T/H analysis is considered appropriate to achieve acceptable accuracy in an optimal computational time. In the present study, the applicability of in-house code CUPID of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute was extended to the subchannel-scale T/H analysis. CUPID is a component-scale T/H analysis code, which uses three-dimensional two-fluid models with various closure models and incorporates a highly parallelized numerical solver. In this study, key models required for a subchannel-scale T/H analysis were implemented in CUPID. Afterward, the code was validated against four subchannel experiments under unheated and heated single-phase incompressible flow conditions. Thereafter, a subchannel-scale T/H analysis of the entire core for an Advanced Power Reactor 1400 reactor core was carried out. For the high-fidelity simulation, detailed geometrical features and individual rod power distributions were considered in this demonstration. In this study, CUPID shows its capability of reproducing key phenomena in a subchannel and dealing with the subchannel-scale whole core T/H analysis.

Keywords

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