GOTHIC-3D applicability to hydrogen combustion analysis

Severe accidents in nuclear power plants can cause hydrogen-generating chemical reactions, which create the danger of hydrogen combustion and thus threaten containment integrity. For containment analyses, a three-dimensional mechanistic code, GOTHIC-3D has been applied near source compartments to predict whether or not highly reactive gas mixtures can form during an accident with the hydrogen mitigation system working. To assess the code applicability to hydrogen combustion analysis, this paper presents the numerical calculation results of GOTHIC-3D for various hydrogen combustion experiments, including FLAME, LSVCTF, and SNU-2D. In this study, a technical base for the modeling of large- and small-scale facilities was introduced through sensitivity studies on cell size and burn modeling parameters. Use of a turbulent burn option of the eddy dissipation concept enabled scale-free applications. Lowering the burn parameter values for the flame thickness and the burn temperature limit resulted in a larger flame velocity. When applied to hydrogen combustion analysis, this study revealed that the GOTHIC-3D code is generally able to predict the combustion phenomena with its default burn modeling parameters for large-scale facilities. However, the code needs further modifications of its burn modeling parameters to be applied to either small-scale facilities or extremely fast transients