| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 299476 | Nuclear Engineering and Design | 2006 | 10 Pages |
The concept of inherent safety features of the modular HTR design with respect to passive decay heat removal through conduction, radiation and natural convection was first introduced in the German HTR-module (pebble fuel) design and subsequently extended to other modular HTR design in recent years, e.g. PBMR (pebble fuel), GT-MHR (prismatic fuel) and the new generation reactor V/HTR (prismatic fuel).This paper presents the numerical simulations of the V/HTR using the thermal-hydraulic code THERMIX which was initially developed for the analysis of HTRs with pebble fuels, verified by experiments, subsequently adopted for applications in the HTRs with prismatic fuels and checked against the results of CRP-3 benchmark problem analyzed by various countries with diverse codes.In this paper, the thermal response of the V/HTR (operating inlet/outlet temperatures 490/1000 °C) during post shutdown passive cooling under pressurized and depressurized primary system conditions has been investigated. Additional investigations have also been carried out to determine the influence of other inlet/outlet operating temperatures (e.g. 490/850, 350/850 or 350/1000 °C) on the maximum fuel and pressure vessel temperature during depressurized cooldown condition. In addition, some sensitivity analyses have also been performed to evaluate the effect of varying the parameters, i.e. decay heat, graphite conductivity, surface emissivity, etc., on the maximum fuel and pressure vessel temperature. The results show that the nominal peak fuel temperatures remain below 1600 °C for all these cases, which is the limiting temperature relating to radioactivity release from the fuel. The analyses presented in this paper demonstrate that the code THERMIX can be successfully applied for the thermal calculation of HTRs with prismatic fuel. The results also provide some fundamental information for the design optimization of V/HTR with respect to its maximum thermal power, operating temperatures, etc.
