Verification of New Capabilities of Deterministic Load Module of FAVOR 09.1

This paper describes a computational study conducted by the Probabilistic Pressure Boundary Integrity Safety Assessment (PISA) program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in support of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sponsored verification of the new capabilities of the latest version of Fracture Analysis of Vessels – Oak Ridge (FAVOR) 09.1. The v09.1 version of FAVOR represents a significant generalization over previous versions, because the problem class for FAVOR has been extended to encompass a broader range of transients and vessel geometries. FAVOR, v09.1, provides the capability to perform both deterministic and risk-informed fracture analyses of boiling water reactors (BWRs) as well as pressurized water reactors (PWRs) subjected to heat-up and cool-down transients. In this study, deterministic solutions generated with the FAVOR v09.1 code for a wide range of representative internal/external surface-breaking flaws and embedded flaws subjected to selected thermal-hydraulic transients were benchmarked with the solutions obtained from ABAQUS (version 6.9-1) for the same transients. Based on the benchmarking analyses, it is concluded that the deterministic module implemented into FAVOR, v09.1, satisfies the criteria described in the FAVOR software design documentation.