Study on the Simulation for the Passive Containment Cooling System of the Advanced PWR in China

The passive containment cooling system (PCCS) of the advanced 3rd generation pressurized water reactor (APWR) utilizes natural phenomena, such as natural convection, condensation and evaporation etc, to transfer the heat released from the reactor to the environment during the postulated design basic accidents of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) and a main steam line break (MSLB). Several containment analysis codes are modified for the analysis on PCCS by the researchers. The modified analysis codes for the PCCS, such as WGOTHIC, were validated by comparison with transient data from some tests, and used to evaluate the heat-removed capability of PCCS performance during the postulated events. The advanced PWR project had started up in China, and the advanced PWR with higher power will be researched and designed. It is very significant to design and develop a system code with self-owned intellectual property rights to analyze and evaluate the PCCS performance of the current advanced PWR or the future advanced PWR with higher power, which is being in progress by State Nuclear Power Technology Research and Development center (SNPTRD). The framework of the code, including the important mechanism models and the code validation, etc., as the basics of the code design, is introduced in this paper. In addition, the computational fluid Dynamics (CFD) also had been applied to solve some thermal-hydraulic problems in Nuclear Reactor Safety (NRS) analysis. Some research results from CFD code for PCCS analysis in China are also shown briefly