Core melt down and vessel failure: a coupled problem

Duijvestijn, G.; Birchley, J.

doi:10.1016/s0029-5493(99)00050-3

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…Essentially, the IVR mitigation is to provide long-term water cooling on the outer RPV wall, so the decay heat is able to be removed without any active actions and assistance measures (Jung et al, 2015). In the traditional concept of IVR, there are two assumptions (S.-H. Duijvestijn and Birchley, 1999): (1) the LH sited at the bottom of RPV is assumed to be fully submerged into water flooding; (2) The melting pool within the RPV is depressurized. However, the above assumptions weren't seriously challenged until the Fukushima accident on 2011 (An et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural integrity investigation for RPV with various cooling water levels under pressurized melting pool

et al. 2018

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Abstract. The strategy denoted as "in-vessel retention (IVR)" is widely used in severe accident (SA) management by most advanced nuclear power plants. The essence of IVR mitigation is to provide long-term external water cooling in maintaining the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) integrity. Actually, the traditional IVR concept assumed that RPV was fully submerged into the water flooding, and the melting pool was depressurized during the SA. The above assumptions weren't seriously challenged until the occurrence of Fukushima accident on 2011, suggesting the structural behavior had not been appropriately assessed. Therefore, the paper tries to address the structure-related issue on determining whether RPV safety can be maintained or not with the effect of various water levels and internal pressures created from core meltdown accident. In achieving it, the RPV structural behaviors are numerically investigated in terms of several field parameters, such as temperature, deformation, stress, plastic strain, creep strain, and total damage. Due to the presence of high temperature melt on the inside and water cooling on the outside, the RPV failure is governed by the failure mechanisms of creep, thermal-plasticity and plasticity. The creep and plastic damages are interacted with each other, which further accelerate the failure process. Through detailed investigation, it is found that the internal pressure as well as water levels plays an important role in determining the RPV failure time, mode and site.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%