FARO tests corium-melt cooling in water pool: roles of melt superheat and sintering in sediment

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Authors
Hwang, Gisuk
Kaviany, Massoud
Moriyama, Kiyofumi
Park, Hyun Sun
Hwang, Byoungcheol
Lee, Mooneon
Kim, Eunho
Park, Jin Ho
Nasersharifi, Yahya
Advisors
Issue Date
2016-08-15
Type
Article
Keywords
Coolant interactions , Debris bed , Breakup , Jet , Coolability , Behavior , Reactor , Metal
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Citation
Hwang, Gisuk; Kaviany, Massoud; Moriyama, Kiyofumi; Park, Hyun Sun; Hwang, Byoungcheol; Lee, Mooneon; Kim, Eunho; Park, Jin Ho; Nasersharifi, Yahya. 2016. FARO tests corium-melt cooling in water pool: roles of melt superheat and sintering in sediment. Nuclear Engineering and Design, vol. 305, 15 August 2016:pp 569–581
Abstract

The FARO tests have aimed at understanding an important severe accident mitigation action in a light water reactor when the accident progresses from the reactor pressure vessel boundary. These tests have aimed to measure the coolability of a molten core material (corium) gravity dispersed as jet into a water pool, quantifying the loose particle diameter distribution and fraction converted to cake under range of initial melt superheat and pool temperature and depth. Under complete hydrodynamic breakup of corium and consequent sedimentation in the pool, the initially superheated corium can result in debris bed consisting of discrete solid particles (loose debris) and/or a solid cake at the bottom of the pool. The success of the debris bed coolability requires cooling of the cake, and this is controlled by the large internal resistance. We postulate that the corium cake forms when there is a remelting part in the sediment. We show that even though a solid shell forms around the melt particles transiting in the water pool due to film-boiling heat transfer, the superheated melt allows remelting of the large particles in the sediment (depending on the water temperature and the transit time) using the COOLAP (Coolability Analysis with Parametric fuel-cooant interaction models) code. With this remelting and its liquid-phase sintering of the non-remelted particles, we predict the fraction of the melt particles converting to a cake through liquid sintering. Our predictions are in good agreement with the existing results of the FARO experiments. We address only those experiments with pool depths sufficient/exceeding the length required for complete breakup of the molten jet. Our analysis of the fate of molten corium aimed at devising the effective scenarios for its safe cooling in the containment so that predicted the minimum pool depth for no cake formation as functions of the melt superheat and water (subcooled/saturation) temperatures.

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Publisher
Elsevier B.V.
Journal
Book Title
Series
Nuclear Engineering and Design;v.305
PubMed ID
DOI
ISSN
0029-5493
EISSN