Research on Thermal Hydraulic Characteristics of Passive Containment Cooling System for Ship Nuclear Power Platform

Author(s):  
Chunhui Dai ◽  
Jun Wu ◽  
Sichao Tan ◽  
Zhenxing Zhao ◽  
Qi Xiao ◽  
...  

Ship nuclear power platform is a small and movable power plant on the sea, aiming at generating electric energy and producing fresh water, it provides support for the national energy strategy. Subsequent to a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), steam is vented in the reactor containment following vaporization of liquid and/or steam expansion. The temperature as well as pressure in the condensation rises synchronously. For removing heat and reducing pressure inside containment subsequent to a LOCA, the Passive containment cooling system of Ship nuclear power platform is designed. In order to establish and maintain the passive heat removing channel, steam condenses on the containment condenser tube surface, coupling natural convection of the seawater inside the tubes. The heat transfer mechanism of Passive containment cooling system is very complex. To solve this problem, a three dimensional heat exchanging/one dimensional natural circulation coupling numerical computing method is proposed to obtained the safety performance of the reactor containment. Models of heat exchanging process between steam which contains non-condensable gas inside the reactor containment and sea water outside are firstly established. Then the thermal-hydraulic characteristics of the steam and sea water beside the heat transfer tubes are obtained by a simulation which is carried out in a LOCA.

Author(s):  
Duccio Griffini ◽  
Massimiliano Insinna ◽  
Simone Salvadori ◽  
Francesco Martelli

A high-pressure vane equipped with a realistic film-cooling configuration has been studied. The vane is characterized by the presence of multiple rows of fan-shaped holes along pressure and suction side while the leading edge is protected by a showerhead system of cylindrical holes. Steady three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations have been performed. A preliminary grid sensitivity analysis with uniform inlet flow has been used to quantify the effect of spatial discretization. Turbulence model has been assessed in comparison with available experimental data. The effects of the relative alignment between combustion chamber and high-pressure vanes are then investigated considering realistic inflow conditions in terms of hot spot and swirl. The inlet profiles used are derived from the EU-funded project TATEF2. Two different clocking positions are considered: the first one where hot spot and swirl core are aligned with passage and the second one where they are aligned with the leading edge. Comparisons between metal temperature distributions obtained from conjugate heat transfer simulations are performed evidencing the role of swirl in determining both the hot streak trajectory within the passage and the coolant redistribution. The leading edge aligned configuration is resulted to be the most problematic in terms of thermal load, leading to increased average and local vane temperature peaks on both suction side and pressure side with respect to the passage aligned case. A strong sensitivity of both injected coolant mass flow and heat removed by heat sink effect has also been highlighted for the showerhead cooling system.


2012 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Imran Qureshi ◽  
Andy D. Smith ◽  
Thomas Povey

Modern lean burn combustors now employ aggressive swirlers to enhance fuel-air mixing and improve flame stability. The flow at combustor exit can therefore have high residual swirl. A good deal of research concerning the flow within the combustor is available in open literature. The impact of swirl on the aerodynamic and heat transfer characteristics of an HP turbine stage is not well understood, however. A combustor swirl simulator has been designed and commissioned in the Oxford Turbine Research Facility (OTRF), previously located at QinetiQ, Farnborough UK. The swirl simulator is capable of generating an engine-representative combustor exit swirl pattern. At the turbine inlet plane, yaw and pitch angles of over ±40 deg have been simulated. The turbine research facility used for the study is an engine scale, short duration, rotating transonic turbine, in which the nondimensional parameters for aerodynamics and heat transfer are matched to engine conditions. The research turbine was the unshrouded MT1 design. By design, the center of the vortex from the swirl simulator can be clocked to any circumferential position with respect to HP vane, and the vortex-to-vane count ratio is 1:2. For the current investigation, the clocking position was such that the vortex center was aligned with the vane leading edge (every second vane). Both the aligned vane and the adjacent vane were characterized. This paper presents measurements of HP vane surface and end wall heat transfer for the two vane positions. The results are compared with measurements conducted without swirl. The vane surface pressure distributions are also presented. The experimental measurements are compared with full-stage three-dimensional unsteady numerical predictions obtained using the Rolls Royce in-house code Hydra. The aerodynamic and heat transfer characterization presented in this paper is the first of its kind, and it is hoped to give some insight into the significant changes in the vane flow and heat transfer that occur in the current generation of low NOx combustors. The findings not only have implications for the vane aerodynamic design, but also for the cooling system design.


Author(s):  
Yu Yu ◽  
Shengfei Wang ◽  
Fenglei Niu

In order to improve the safety of new generation nuclear power plant, passive containment cooling system is innovatively used in AP1000 reactor design. However, since the system operation is based on natural circulation, physical process failure — natural circulation cannot establish or be maintained — becomes one of the important failure modes. Uncertainties in the physical parameters such as heat and cold source temperature and in the structure parameters have important effect on the system reliability. In this paper, thermal–hydraulic model is established for passive containment cooling system in AP1000 and the thermal–hydraulic performance is studied, the effect of factors such as air temperature and reactor power on the system reliability are analyzed.


Author(s):  
Prasad Vegendla ◽  
Rui Hu

Abstract This paper discusses the modeling and simulations of deteriorated turbulent heat transfer (DTHT) for a wall-heated fluid flows, which can be observed in gas-cooled nuclear power reactors during pressurized conduction cooldown (PCC) event due to loss of force circulation flow. The DTHT regime is defined as the deterioration of normal turbulent heat transport due to increase of acceleration and buoyancy forces. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools such as Nek5000 and STAR-CCM+ can help to analyze the DTHT phenomena in reactors for efficient thermal-fluid designs. Three-dimensional (3D) CFD nonisothermal modeling and simulations were performed in a wall-heated circular tube. The simulation results were validated with two different CFD tools, Nek5000 and STAR-CCM+, and validated with an experimental data. The predicted bulk temperatures were identical in both CFD tools, as expected. Good agreement between simulated results and measured data were obtained for wall temperatures along the tube axis using Nek5000. In STAR-CCM+, the under-predicted wall temperatures were mainly due to higher turbulence in the wall region. In STAR-CCM+, the predicted DTHT was over 48% at outlet when compared to inlet heat transfer values.


Author(s):  
A. Khalatov

This paper consists of two sections. The first section of the paper illustrates successful application of the improved approach developed by author to the endwall heat transfer data analysis in a low speed linear guide vane and in a curved duct. Effects of a three dimensional turbulent flow, a horseshoe vortex, a passage vortex, as well as an entry boundary layer thickness have been considered in both passages and as a result the common experimental correlation on a local heat transfer have been derived for the H/t = 1.0 ratio. All affected factors are presented as a superposition of the linear correction functions in the basic experimental correlation for a flat plate heat transfer. In the second section the common correlation is used as the reference correlation to establish effect of the span-to-pitch ratio on the endwall heat transfer in both passages. It was found that variation in the H/t ratio affects slightly the freestream velocity; the most important result which came from the heat transfer study is that in contrast to a curved duct a heat transfer rate in a blade passage is reduced while the H/t ratio decreases. Comparison of the experimental data obtained by the author with results of the two-dimensional heat transfer prediction confirms that it is very important to take a three-dimensional heat transfer nature into account in design of the endwall convective cooling system. It has been demonstrated that distinction between the results of two- and three dimensional approach to the endwall heat transfer can achieve up to 70% at the passage’s inlet area.


Author(s):  
Yukiko Kawabata ◽  
Masayoshi Matsuura ◽  
Shizuka Hirako ◽  
Takashi Hoshi

The Japan Atomic Power Company has initiative in developing the DMS concept as a 400MWe-class light water reactor. The main features of the DMS relative to overcoming the scale demerit are the miniaturization and simplification of systems and equipment, integrated modulation of construction, standardization of equipment layouts and effective use of proven technology. The decrease in primary containment vessel (PCV) height is achieved by reducing the active fuel length of the DMS core, which is about two meters compared with 3.7 meters in the conventional BWR. The short active fuel length reduces the drop in core pressure, and overcomes the natural circulation system. And by using the lower steam velocity in the upper plenum in the reactor pressure vessel (RPV), we can adopt a free surface separation (FSS) system. The FSS eliminates the need for a separator and thus helps minimize the RPV and PCV sizes. In order to improve safety efficiency, developing an Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) for the DMS was considered. The ECCS configuration in the DMS was examined to achieve core coverage and economic efficiency from the following. 1: Eliminating high-pressure injection systems. 2: Adopting passive safety-related systems. 3: Optimizing distribution for the systems and power source for the ECCS. In this way the configuration of the ECCS for the DMS was established, providing the same level of safety as the ABWR and the passive systems. Based on the results of Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA) analysis, core cover can be achieved by this configuration. Therefore, the plant concept was found to offer both economic efficiency and safety.


Author(s):  
Yu Yu ◽  
Shengfei Wang ◽  
Fenglei Niu

Passive containment cooling system (PCCS) is an important safety-related system in AP1000 nuclear power plant, by which heat produced in reactor is transferred to the heat sink – atmosphere – based on natural circulation, independent of human response or the operation of outside equipments, so the reactor capacity of resisting external hazards (earthquake, flood, etc.) is improved. However since the system operation based on natural circulation, many uncertainty factors such as temperatures of cold and heat sources will affect the system reliability, and physical process failure becomes one of the important contributors to system failure, which is not considered in the active system reliability analysis. That is, the system will lose its function since the natural circulation cannot be established or kept even when the equipments in the system can work well. The function of PCCS in AP1000 is to transfer the heat produced in the containment to the environment and to keep the pressure in the containment below its threshold. After accidents the steam is injected to the containment and can be cooled and condensed when it arrives at the containment wall, then the heat is transferred to the atmosphere through the steel vessel. So the peak value of the pressure is influenced by the steam situation which is injected into the containment and the heat transfer and condensate processes under the accidents. In this paper the dynamic thermal-hydraulic (T-H) model simulating the fluid performance in the containment is established, based on which the system reliability model is built. Here the total pressure in the containment is used as the success criteria. Apparently the system physical process failure may be related to the system working state, the outside conditions, the system structure parameters and so on, and it’s a heavy work to analyze the influences of all the factors, so only the effects of important ones are included in the model. Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is used to evaluate the system reliability, in which the input parameters such as air temperature are sampled based on their probabilistic density distributions. The pressure curves along with the accident development are gained and the system reliabilities under different accidents are gotten as well as the main contributors. The results illustrate that the system physical process failure probabilities are varied under different climate conditions, which result in the system reliability and the main contributors to system failure changing, so the different methods can be taken to improve the system reliability according to the local condition of the nuclear power plant.


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