Flow-Solid Coupling Analysis of Pressure Vessels on Floating Nuclear Power Plants

Lead-cooled fast reactors are an important choice for small-scaled reactor in floating nuclear power plants. Compared with land-based nuclear power plants, floating nuclear power plants have advantages in stability, which eliminate the impact from earthquake. One aspect remains to be solved is that the lead-cooled fast reactors contains a large volume of liquid that may slosh under the marine environment. The sloshing of liquid may cause external pressure on the nuclear reactor vessel and internal components., which has a great impact on the safety of the reactor. To study the fluid structure interaction between liquid and reactor vessel, this paper establishes an numerical model for the mechanical analysis of the main vessel of a floating nuclear power plant under loads of the marine environment. The mechanical response of the main vessel of a floating nuclear power plant in the marine environment is analyzed by applying the dynamic mesh method and VOF model. The motion of marine environmental loads are applied by the remote displacement method. We study several typical loadings in operation conditions. The study shows that the stress on reactor vessel caused by fluid sloshing is relatively small when long-period loading is applied; and the effect of swaying is larger than the rolling.