Computer code for the thermal-hydraulic analysis of ITU TRIGA Mark-II reactor

Istanbul Technical University (ITU) TRIGA Mark-II reactor core consists of ninety vertical cylindrical elements located in five rings. Sixty-nine of them are fuel elements. The reactor is operated and cooled with natural convection by pool water, which is also cooled and purified in external coolant circuits by forced convection. This characteristic leads to consider both the natural and forced convection heat transfer in a 'porous-medium analysis'. The safety analysis of the reactor requires a thermal-hydraulic model of the reactor to determine the thermal-hydraulic parameters in each mode of operation. In this study, a computer code cooled TRIGA-PM (TRIGA - Porous Medium) for the thermal-hydraulic analysis of ITU is considered. TRIGA Mark-II reactor code has been developed to obtain velocity, pressure and temperature distributions in the reactor pool as a function of core design parameters and pool configuration. The code is a transient, thermal-hydraulic code and requires geometric and physical modelling parameters. In the model, although the reactor is considered as only porous medium, the other part of the reactor pool is considered partly as continuum and partly as porous medium. COMMIX-1C code is used for the benchmark purpose of TRIGA-PM code. For the normal operating conditions of the reactor, estimations of TRIGA-PM are in good agreement with those of COMMIX-1C. After some more improvements, this code will be employed for the estimation of LOCA scenario, which can not be analyses by COMMIX-1C and the other multi-purpose codes, considering a break at one of the beam tubes of the reactor