Analysis of core disruptive accident in liquid metal-cooled fast breeder reactors using method of characteristics

This paper deals with the analysis of core disruptive accident (CDA) in liquid metal-cooled fast breeder reactors (LMFBRs). Analysis of CDA provides an estimate of the pressure loading on the containment structure due to the accident, so that the structure can be designed to withstand this loading. A few other schemes using Eulerian, Lagrangian or mixed formulation are already available for the CDA analysis. Nevertheless, these schemes have certain drawbacks. Here an attempt was made to overcome these drawbacks by applying method of characteristics (MOC) formulation for the analysis of CDA model. First a proposed one-dimensional CDA model was analysed using MOC. Later, the same one-dimensional model was analysed by following a two-dimensional MOC scheme known as nearcharacteristic method for validating the two-dimensional algorithm. The one and two-dimensional schemes were giving matching results thus validating the MOC based algorithm in two dimensions. (author). 7 refs., 7 figs