Annals of the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conference 13

ISBN 1-56700-225-0 / CD 1-56700-226-9

Year 2006

M. Furuya
Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), Tokyo, JAPAN

T. Fukahori
Global Nuclear Fuel Japan (GNF-J), Kanagawa, JAPAN

S. Mizokami
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), Tokyo, JAPAN

J Yokoya
Electric Power Development (J-POWER), Tokyo, JAPAN

In order to investigate the stability of a nuclear reactor core with mixture oxide of uranium and plutonium (MOX) fuel installed, channel and regional stability tests were conducted with the SIRIUS-F facility. The SIRIUS-F facility was designed and constructed to provide a highly accurate simulation of thermal-hydraulic (channel) instabilities and coupled thermalhydraulics-neutronics instabilities of the Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWR). A real-time simulation was performed by the modal-point kinetics of reactor neutronics and fuel-rod thermal conduction on the basis of a measured void fraction in a reactor core section of the facility. A noise analysis was performed to calculate decay ratios and resonance frequencies from the dominant poles of transfer function on the basis of an autoregressive model (AR) using time series data, measured from a core inlet flow of the facility.
The experiments were conducted over a wide range of operating conditions, including maximum power points along the minimum pump speed line and the natural circulation line of the ABWR with MOX fuel installed. The experimentally obtained decay ratios and resonance frequencies are in good agreement with those calculated using the linear stability analysis code, ODYSY. The SIRIUS-F experimental results demonstrated stability characteristics as a function of the power, and revealed a sufficiently large stability margin even under hypothetical conditions of power level.

ENR-14 pages DOI: 10.1615/IHTC13.p24.140 Download article

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