Studies on the self-leveling behavior in debris beds are crucial in the assessment of core-disruptive accidents (CDAs) that could occur in sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs). To clarify this behavior, a series of experiments have been performed in which nitrogen gas has been percolated uniformly through a particle bed. In these experiments, solid particles and water contained in a rectangular tank simulate respectively fuel debris and coolant. Based on the data obtained, an empirical model was developed to describe the transient variation in the bed inclination angle during the self-leveling process. Good agreement has been obtained between calculated and experimental values. Verification of the model has been confirmed through detailed analysis of the effects of experimental parameters such as particle size, particle density, and gas flow rate. Its applicability to extended conditions was further discussed by performing modeling simulations and comparing results against experimental data obtained from a larger-scale experimental system that employed a conventional boiling method. With further improvements, the model will be tested under more realistic reactor conditions and is expected to benefit future analyses and simulations of CDAs in SFRs.

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Studies on the self-leveling behavior in debris beds are crucial in the assessment of core-disruptive accidents (CDAs) that could occur in sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs). To clarify this behavior, a series of experiments have been performed in which nitrogen gas has been percolated uniformly through a particle bed. In these experiments, solid particles and water contained in a rectangular tank simulate respectively fuel debris and coolant. Based on the data obtained, an empirical model was developed to describe the transient variation in the bed inclination angle during the self-leveling process. Good agreement has been obtained between calculated and experimental values. Verification of the model has been confirmed through detailed analysis of the effects of experimental parameters such as particle size, particle density, and gas flow rate. Its applicability to extended conditions was further discussed by performing modeling simulations and comparing results against experimental data obtained from a larger-scale experimental system that employed a conventional boiling method. With further improvements, the model will be tested under more realistic reactor conditions and is expected to benefit future analyses and simulations of CDAs in SFRs.

In a core disruptive accident of a fast breeder reactor, the post accident heat removal is crucial to achieve in-vessel core retention. Therefore, a series of experiments on bubble behavior in a particle bed was performed to clarify three-phase flow dynamics in debris bed, which is essential in heat-removal capability, under coolant boiling conditions. Although in the past several experiments have been carried out in the gas-liquid-solid system to investigate the bubble dynamics, most of them were under lower solid holdup (≤ 0.5), where the solid-phase influence may be not so important as much as the liquid phase. While for this study, the solid holdup is much higher (> 0.55) where the particle-bubble interaction may be dominated. The current experiment was conducted in a 2D tank with the dimensions of 300 mm height, 200 mm width and 10 mm gap thickness. Water was used as liquid phase, while bubbles were generated by injecting nitrogen gas from the bottom of the tank. Various experimental parameters were taken, including different particle bed height (from 30 mm to 200 mm), various particle diameter (from 0.4 mm to 6 mm), different particle type (acrylic, glass, alumina and zirconia beads), and different nitrogen gas flow rate (around 1.75 ml/min and 2.7 ml/min). By using digital image analysis method, three kinds of bubble rise behavior were observed under current experimental conditions and confirmed by the quantitative detailed analysis of bubble rise properties including bubble departure frequency and bubble departure size. This experiment is expected in the future to provide appropriate quantitative data for the analysis and verification of SIMMER-III, an advanced fast reactor safety analysis code.

SUMMARYA framework of context-sensitive grammar transform for speeding-up compressed pattern matching (CPM) is proposed. A greedy compression algorithm with the transform model is presented as well as a Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP)-type compressed pattern matching algorithm. The compression ratio is a match for gzip and Re-Pair, and the search speed of our CPM algorithm is almost twice faster than the KMP-type CPM algorithm on Byte-Pair-Encoding by Shibata et al. [18], and in the case of short patterns, faster than the Boyer-Moore-Horspool algorithm with the stopper encoding by Rautio et al. [14], which is regarded as one of the best combinations that allows a practically fast search.