Development and primary verification of a transient analysis software for high temperature gas-cooled reactor helium turbine power system

The transient analysis software, HTR-GTsim, is developed to simulate transient characteristics of a high temperature gas-cooled reactor helium turbine power system (HTR-10GT) of INET in Tsinghua University, which is the secondary engineering project of HTR-10. The analysis models include point reactor neutron kinetics model, one-dimensional thermodynamic reactor model, rotor dynamic blower model, counter-current heat exchanger model, quasi-static helium turbine and pressure compressor model, and so on. HTR-GTsim is verified by 3 tests of a 10 MW high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR-10), which are reactivity insertion test, helium flow change test and water flow change test. The simulation results of reactivity insertion test show that there is a strong self-adjusting ability for HTR-10 reactor power due to negative temperature feedback. The simulation results of helium flow change test are compared with those of the water flow change test. It is found that the disturbance induced in the latter test is significantly weaker than that in the former due to the huge heat capacity of the graphite in the core. The calculation results of HTR-GTsim are compared with the test data and simulation results of THERMIX program. Good agreement is obtained. Because of the limitation of validation, more work need to be done to verify the accuracy of HTR-GTsim to simulate a gas turbine device.

► This paper describes HTR-GTsim code, a system code for the transient analysis of helium turbine system.
► Point reactor neutron kinetics model and one-dimensional thermodynamic model is employed.
► HTR-GTsim is compared with tests of HTR-10 and simulation results of Thermix code.
► The analysis of calculated results validates the present model.