MELCOR 1.8.2 Assessment: IET direct containment heating tests

MELCOR is a fully integrated, engineering-level computer code, being developed at Sandia National Laboratories for the USNRC, that models the entire spectrum of severe accident phenomena in a unified framework for both BWRs and PWRS. As part of an ongoing assessment program, the MELCOR computer code has been used to analyze several of the IET direct containment heating experiments done at 1:10 linear scale in the Surtsey test facility at Sandia and at 1:40 linear scale in the corium-water thermal interactions (CWTI) COREXIT test facility at Argonne National Laboratory. These MELCOR calculations were done as an open post-test study, with both the experimental data and CONTAIN results available to guide the selection of code input. Basecase MELCOR results are compared to test data in order to evaluate the new HPME DCH model recently added in MELCOR version 1.8.2. The effect of various user-input parameters in the HPME model, which define both the initial debris source and the subsequent debris interaction, were investigated in sensitivity studies. In addition, several other non-default input modelling changes involving other MELCOR code packages were required in our IET assessment analyses in order to reproduce the observed experiment behavior. Several calculations were done to identify whether any numeric effects exist in our DCH IET assessment analyses