Experiments and analytical studies related to blowdown and containment thermal hydraulics on CSF

• Blowdown and containment thermal hydraulics experiments conducted in CSF.
• RELAP5, ASTEC and CONTRAN codes used for analysis.
• Containment peak pressure and temp predicted close to experimental values.
• CONTRAN and ASTEC codes predict early containment depressurization.
• Numerical procedure, benchmarked for loss of coolant accident in nuclear reactors.

Containment Studies Facility (CSF) is volumetrically scaled down model of Indian Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (IPHWR) containment for simulating LOCA/MSLB conditions which consists of concrete containment model (CM) and Primary Heat Transport Model (PHTM) vessel. Blowdown experiments at different initial vessel pressure conditions were recently conducted at CSF and the vessel and containment parameters such as pressure, temperature and level transients have been recorded during the experiments.The experimental results have been used for benchmarking of numerical procedure adopted for evaluating LOCA/MSLB conditions in nuclear containment. The numerical procedure involves simulation of blowdown phenomena using RELAP5 code for evaluating mass and energy discharge rates, which are then used for calculating containment pressure–temperature transients using ASTEC and in-house CONTRAN codes. Predictions of major parameters of vessel and containment model were found to be in good agreement with that of experimental data.In containment thermal hydraulic calculations, condensation heat transfer coefficient affects the containment pressure–temperature transients. Various empirical condensation models like Tagami, Uchida and Diffusion models have been incorporated in CONTRAN code and suitable condensation model has been identified for which predicted pressure values are close to the experimental one. The details of the experimental and analytical studies conducted are presented in this paper.