Ablation and thermal stress analysis of RPV vessel under heating by core melt

After a reactor core melts and collapses suddenly, the melting core accumulates on the base surface of the bottom head of a reactor pressure vessel (RPV), causing severe thermal ablation and thermal stress, endangering the safety of the RPV bottom head. In this study, a 1000-MW pressurized water reactor is considered an example to study the heat transfer ablation and thermal stress of an RPV lower head after a core collapses, by performing numerical simulations. A two-dimensional (2D) heat transfer model is used to analyze the coupling heat transfer between the wall surface of the RPV, two-layer melting corium pool, and outer water chamber. The transient 2D temperature and ablation of the lower head wall surface are calculated. The thermal stress of the RPV lower head and deformation are also investigated using ANSYS software. The results show that (1) The upper crust is the least thick, with a thickness of approximately 0.01 m, whereas the side crust is the thickest at approximately 0.12 m at the base of the lower head. (2) The minimum thickness of the bottom wall decreases linearly with time, starting from the collapse time of the core to 2500 s, when it becomes 0.04 m. It does not change thereafter, but the melting zone is further expanded. (3) The lower head wall starts to melt from 200 s after the core collapses. The melting mass first increases sharply, and subsequently, increases slightly with time. The total melted material is 3000 kg at 5000 s. (4) The heat flux at the inner and outer surfaces of the lower head immersed in the uranium melt layer increases with the azimuth angle, reaching a maximum value of 750 kw/m2 and 250 kw/m2, respectively, at the interface with the metal melt. The heat flux at the RPV inner wall covered by the metal melt is approximately constant at 400 kw/m2, whereas that at the outer surface decreases with the azimuth angle. (5) The stress at the lower head is concentrated at the inner surface, with a maximum value of 625.65 MPa. The radial deformation increases with time only until 2200 s, with a maximum deformation of 28.39 mm occurring in the lower part of the RPV bottom.