Modelling of the passive cooling containment system: European Incon Project

The containment system plays a key role in the prevention and mitigation of severe accidents. For this reason, the European Utility Requirements (EUR) stress the importance of developing innovative designs which address important technological challenges. Among the different design options, a double concrete containment with a passive cooling containment system (PCCS) has been proposed. This system consists of three integrated components: an internal heat exchanger (located inside the primary containment), an external heat exchanger, and and intermediate exchanger (to connect the other two). The INCON (INnnovative CONtainmente Cooling for Double Concrete Containment) project aims to demonstrate the technical viability of the PCCS concept by means of a series of tests and simulations. One of the project's achievements is the identification and characterisation of the heat transfer phenomenon in the three integrated heat exchangers. One of the tasks within the INCON project was to obtain a validated thermohydraulic simulation model of the PCCS system intermediate heat exchanger. As a result, a model has been developed, based on the RELAP5/MOD3.2 code, which is capable of analysing and simulating the thermohydraulic behaviour of a scale test model of the system. The model has the capacity to predict special effects such as back flow, system behaviour with entrapped air, high heat transfer phenomena (simulating hydrogen explosions), startup, etc, giving simulation results, set out in this paper, which are comparable to the results obtained from the tests. (Author)