EBaLM-THP – A neural network thermohydraulic prediction model of advanced nuclear system components

In lieu of the worldwide energy demand, economics and consensus concern regarding climate change, nuclear power – specifically near-term nuclear power plant designs are receiving increased engineering attention. However, as the nuclear industry is emerging from a lull in component modeling and analyses, optimization for example using ANN has received little research attention. This paper presents a neural network approach, EBaLM, based on a specific combination of two training algorithms, error-back propagation (EBP), and Levenberg–Marquardt (LM), applied to a problem of thermohydraulics predictions (THPs) of advanced nuclear heat exchangers (HXs).The suitability of the EBaLM-THP algorithm was tested on two different reference problems in thermohydraulic design analysis; that is, convective heat transfer of supercritical CO2 through a single tube, and convective heat transfer through a printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) using CO2. Further, comparison of EBaLM-THP and a polynomial fitting approach was considered. Within the defined reference problems, the neural network approach generated good results in both cases, in spite of highly fluctuating trends in the dataset used. In fact, the neural network approach demonstrated cumulative measure of the error one to three orders of magnitude smaller than that produce via polynomial fitting of 10th order.