Numerical study of thermal-hydraulic behavior on the integral test facility of HPR1000 containment based on CONTHAC-3D

Abstract

The integral test facility-platform for the integral thermal-hydraulic behavior of containment (PANGU), is used to study the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the containment under the action of the passive containment heat removal system (PCS) when accident occurs. An in-house code called CONTHAC-3D was developed to investigate the fundamental thermal-hydraulic phenomena occurring in the containment during accidents for nuclear power plants, and it also had the ability to simulate specific systems such as the PCS system, containment hydrogen control system, etc. In order to validate the capability of CONTHAC-3D code to simulate PCS system, the numerical model of the PANGU facility was established and three typical experimental scenarios were used to verify its ability. The results show that for the selected three accident scenarios, the PCS power calculated by CONTHAC-3D is slightly lower than the experimental data. However, in general, both the peak and long-term values of the containment atmospheric pressure, temperature and PCS heat removal power are kept within a small error range compared with experimental data. Therefore, it can be concluded that the PCS module developed in the CONTHAC-3D code can effectively track the power changes and flow fluctuations of the PCS system, and the thermal-hydraulic conditions in the facility.