Study on in-vessel thermohydraulics phenomena of sodium-cooled fast reactors. 4. Numerical analysis of 1/10 scaled water experiment with the AQUA code

A large-scale sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor in the feasibility studies on commercialized fast reactors has a feature of consideration of thorough simplified and compacted systems and components design to realize drastic economical improvements. Therefore, special attentions should be paid to thermohydraulic designs for gas entrainment behavior from free surface, flow-induced vibration of in-vessel components, thermal stratification in the plenum, thermal shock for various structures due to high-speed coolant flows, nonsymmetrical coolant flows, etc. in the reactor vessel. A numerical analysis was carried out with a multi-dimensional code AQUA to confirm an applicability to the evaluations for the in-vessel thermohydraulic phenomena using a 1/10 scaled water experiment simulating the large-scale fast breeder reactor in the feasibility studies. From the analysis, the following results were obtained. (1) In-vessel thermohydraulics characterized by a radiated flow pattern to the reactor vessel wall and a strong upward flow through a slit of the upper core structures were evaluated. These characteristics agreed approximately with the water experiment. (2) The upward velocity values at the slit agreed well with the experimental data under a condition of γz = 0.3 and ξz = 0.5, though overall evaluations of the in-vessel thermohydraulics were failed to predict quantitatively. (3) The AQUA code is applicable to the in-vessel thermohydraulics evaluations in the feasibility studies, though it is necessary to make further modifications of the calculational models for accurate evaluations. On the one hand, it was confirmed that calculated results for the 1/10 water experimental model and the 1/1 actual-scaled model agreed quantitatively for the in-vessel thermohydraulics characteristics indicated above. (author)