Investigation on Header Manifold Model Effect at CANDU6 Large Loss of Cooling Accident

In a CANDU 6 nuclear power reactor fuel bundles are supported in horizontal Zircaloy pressure tubes tube through which the heavy-water coolant flows. 95 pressure tubes are connected by individual feeders to a common header. For CANDU 6 safety analyses, even when multiple channels model is employed, only one node is used for header. In this approach, all the channels are subjected to the same boundary condition. However, site inlet and outlet header pressure measurements and ultrasonic feeder flow data, confirm the existence of axial pressure gradients along the inlet and outlet headers. These axial pressure gradients would give rise to individual header-to-header pressure drops for each channel and also to flow distribution throughout both the inlet and outlet headers. In this paper, the header manifold model effect on the large break loss of coolant accident analyses of CANDU reactors has been performed by RELAP5/ mod 3.4 code. The 35% reactor inlet header break was selected for this study, as this break size produce the highest fuel clad temperature among all postulated breaks size. The results obtained considering the header manifold model, show that location of fuel channel upon break location has a strong impact on peak clad temperature calculation.