Regular Article

Thermal-hydraulics/thermal-mechanics temporal coupling for unprotected loss of flow accidents simulations on a SFR

¹ CEA, DEN, DM2S, SERMA, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
² CEA, DEN, DER, CPA, 13108 Saint-Paul-Lez-Durance cedex, France

^* e-mail: cyril.patricot@cea.fr

Received: 12 May 2015
Accepted: 25 November 2015
Published online: 11 January 2016

Abstract

In the frame of ASTRID designing, unprotected loss of flow (ULOF) accidents are considered. As the reactor is not scrammed, power evolution is driven by neutronic feedbacks, among which Doppler effect, linked to fuel temperature, is prominent. Fuel temperature is calculated using thermal properties of fuel pins (we will focus on heat transfer coefficient between fuel pellet and cladding, H_gap, and on fuel thermal conductivity, λ_fuel) which vary with irradiation conditions (neutronic flux, mass flow and history for instance) and during transient (mainly because of dilatation of materials with temperature). In this paper, we propose an analysis of the impact of spatial variation and temporal evolution of thermal properties of fuel pins on a CFV-like core [M.S. Chenaud et al., Status of the ASTRID core at the end of the pre-conceptual design phase 1, in Proceedings of ICAPP 2013, Jeju Island, Korea (2013)] behavior during an ULOF accident. These effects are usually neglected under some a priori conservative assumptions. The vocation of our work is not to provide a best-estimate calculation of ULOF transient, but to discuss some of its physical aspects. To achieve this goal, we used TETAR, a thermal-hydraulics system code developed by our team to calculate ULOF transients, GERMINAL V1.5, a CEA code dedicated to SFR pin thermal-mechanics calculations and APOLLO3^®, a neutronic code in development at CEA.