Assessment of TRACE Code for GE Level Swell Test to Review Industrial Code

Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety(KINS) has reviewed the industrial code for safety analysis of nuclear power plant, in which TRACE and MARS-KS codes are being used to support the understanding of specific phenomena and code prediction. For this aspect, the TRACE code was assessed for the GE Level Swell Experiment. General Electric (GE) performed a series of experiments to investigate thermal-hydraulic phenomena such as critical flow, void distribution, and liquid-vapor mixture swell during blowdown conditions. These GE Level swell experiments are frequently simulated to verify safety analysis codes as a separate effect test. TRACE code calculations with version 5.0 patch 4 for GE Level Swell experiment 1004-3 have been performed to assess the applicability of the TRACE code for verification of industrial code. An Assessment analysis of the TRACE version 5.0 patch 4 code was carried out for GE Level Swell experiments 1004-3 by comparison purpose with SPACE. Overall, TRACE predicted the pressure and axial void fractions at different times reasonably well for 1004-3 blowdown test, while SPACE tends to underestimate the pressure. It was also found that results of void fraction distribution should be compared at different time to discuss the accuracy of the SPACE code against this test