Analysis of the THAI Iod-11 and Iod-12 tests: Advancements and limitations of ASTEC V2.0R3p1 and MELCOR V2.1.4803

This work is related to the application of the ASTEC V2.0R3p1 and MELCOR V2.1.4803 codes to the analysis of the THAI Iod-11 and Iod-12 containment tests characterised by an iodine release. The main scope of these two tests was to investigate the steel interaction on dry and wet surfaces, with an interaction supposed to be a two-steps process: an initial faster and reversible physisorption followed by a slower, and irreversible, chemisorption of the physisorbed I2. The aim of the present work is to highlight advancements and limitations of the current ASTEC and MELCOR code versions respect to the older code versions employed during the European SARNET projects. The investigation was carried out as a code-to-code comparison vs. the experimental THAI data, focusing on the evaluation of the code models treating the iodine behaviour. A similar spatial nodalisation was employed for both codes. As main result, ASTEC had shown an overall good agreement compared to the iodine related experimental data while, on contrary, MELCOR had shown poor results, probably due to unsolved numerical issues and unsatisfactory iodine modellisation.