Application of CUPID for subchannel-scale thermal–hydraulic analysis of pressurized water reactor core under single-phase conditions

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Seok Jong Yoon, Seul Been Kim, Goon Cherl Park, Han Young Yoon, Hyoung Kyu Cho
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2018-02-01
Series:Nuclear Engineering and Technology
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1738573317302632
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1738-5733