International standard problem ISP37: VANAM M3 - A Multi compartment aerosol depletion test with hygroscopic aerosol material: comparison report

This paper presents the results and assessment of the 'open' ISP37, which deals with the containment thermal-hydraulics and aerosol behavior during an unmitigated severe LWR accident with core melt-down and steam and aerosol release into the containment. Representatives of 22 organizations participated to the ISP37 using the codes CONTAIN, FIPLOC, MELCOR, RALOC, FUMO, MACRES, REMOVAL etc. The containment and aerosol behavior experiment VANAM M3 was selected as experimental comparison basis. The main phenomena investigated are the thermal behavior of a multi-compartment containment, e.g. pressure, temperature and the distribution and depletion of a soluble aerosol. The ISP37 has demonstrated that the codes used could calculate the thermal-hydraulic containment behavior in general with sufficient accuracy. But with respect to the needs of aerosol behavior analysis the accuracies, both analytical and experimental as well, for specific thermal-hydraulic variables should be improved. Although large progress has been made in the simulation of aerosol behavior in multi-compartment geometries the calculated local aerosol concentrations scatter widely. However, the aerosol source term to the environment is overestimated in general. The largest uncertainty concerning the aerosol results is caused by a limited number of thermal hydraulic variables like relative humidity, volume condensation rate and atmospheric flow rate. In some codes also a solubility model is missing