TRACE/PARCS ASSESSMENT BASED ON PEACH BOTTOM TURBINE TRIP AND LOW FLOW STABILITY TESTS
Open Access
- Author:
- Neykov, Boyan S
- Graduate Program:
- Nuclear Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Maria Nikolova Avramova, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kostadin Nikolov Ivanov, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- Low Flow Stability Tests
Turbine Trip
Peach Bottom
TRACE - Abstract:
- The simulation of the nuclear reactor core behavior and plant dynamics as well as their mutual interactions has a significant impact on the design and operation, safety and economics of nuclear power plants. The U. S. NRC uses computer models to study the phenomena associated with reactor safety issues. The reactor system analysis code TRACE (TRAC RELAP5 Advanced Computational Engine) is used to study the reactor coolant system under a wide variety of flow conditions including multi-phase thermal hydraulics. Multidimensional time dependent power distributions are required for accurate simulation and the PARCS (Purdue Advanced Reactor Core Simulator) multi-dimensional reactor kinetics code has been coupled to TRACE to provide accurate simulation capabilities of some reactor transient or accident scenarios. TRACE/PARCS has been previously validated for Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) transient analysis using the OECD/NEA Main Steam Line Break (MSLB) Benchmark. During the last decade the OECD/NEA has sponsored the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Turbine Trip (TT) Benchmark, designed to provide a validation basis for the new generation best estimate codes - coupled three-dimensional (3D) kinetics system thermal-hydraulic codes. The objectives of this thesis are focused on the assessment of TRACE/PARCS for BWR transient analysis. In this case the BWR TT benchmark problem and Low Flow Stability Tests are appropriate to assess the accuracy of TRACE/PARCS for BWR analysis. The problems exhibit significant space/time flux variations and are based on the measurement of plant data during the transients. These are the Peach Bottom 2 (PB2) Turbine Trip (TT) experiment and Low Flow Stability tests performed in 1977. The analyses of both the Peach Bottom Turbine Trip 2 experiment and the Low Flow Stability tests using TRACE/PARCS showed that calculation results agree reasonably well with both initial steady-state and transient measured data for each test. The thesis provides a detailed description of the developed methods and the obtained results of the analyses for both PB2 TT and Low Flow Stability Tests with TRACE/PARCS.