Numerical Simulation of Core Temperature and Melting Process of IVR Core After a Severe Water Loss Accident

After the occurrence of severe water loss accident in a PWR, the water level in the reactor core would decrease gradually, leading to heat up and melted down of the core, threatening safety of the nuclear power plant and the surrounding environment. In this paper, the 1/4 core of AP1000 PWR was adopted for study, a numerical method has been established to calculate the transient change of temperature and melting process of the core and envelope structure (boarding, basket and RPV) after the severe water loss accident. A two-dimensional conduction model with cylindrical coordinate has been used to simulate heat transfer along the radius and height direction of fuel rods and control rods in fuel assemblies. Heat transfer condition on rod surface considers nucleate boiling for rod surface below the water level, while radiative heat transfer among neighboring rods and natural convection with water vapor was considered for rod surface above the water level. Heat transfer along thickness of envelope structures were modeled with the one-dimensional conduction model. The results show that the maximum temperature of the whole reactor core does not exceed 3000K and AP1000 will not meet the melting of fuel rods with the help of RPV external water chamber cooling. The temperature values of the fuel rods and the control rod show the characteristic distribution of the two regions. At 4904s, the maximum temperature of the rod rises to 2900K, and then stabilize. The temperature of the shell is up to 2000K, the maximum temperature of the basket is to 1260K, the variation of RPV wall temperature is not obvious.