The containment is an ultimate and important barrier to mitigate the consequences after the release of mass and energy during such scenarios as loss of coolant accident (LOCA) or main steam line break (MSLB). In this investigation, a passive containment cooling system (PCCS) concept is proposed for a large dry concrete containment. The system is composed of series of heat exchangers, long connecting pipes with relatively large diameter, valves, and a water tank, which is located at the top of the system and serves as the final heat sink. The performance of the system is numerically studied in detail under different conditions. In addition, the influences of condensation heat transfer conditions and containment environment temperature conditions are also studied on the behaviors of the system. The results reveal that four distinct operating stages could be experienced as follows: startup stage, single phase quasisteady stage, flashing speed-up transient stage, and flashing dominated quasisteady operating stage. Furthermore, the mechanisms of system behaviors are thus analyzed. Moreover, the feasibility of the system is also discussed to meet the design purpose for the containment integrity requirement. Considering the passive feature and the compactness of the system, the proposed PCCS is promising for the advanced integral type reactor.
An open natural circulation system applied to the passive containment cooling system is proposed for the large dry double-wall concrete containment after severe accidents. In order to investigate the operating behaviors of the open loop, a numerical code is developed to simulate the transient flow characteristics from the startup to the long-term operation. The results show that the open system may experience such four stages as startup process, quasi-steady single-phase flow, transition stage and quasi-steady two-phase flow. Flashing is the dominated factor in the last two flow phases. Additionally, the effects of some systematic parameters on the mass flow rate are analyzed in detail. Both increasing the condensation heat transfer coefficient and the containment temperature can enhance the flow effectively whichever stage the system operates in. But the the initial fluid temperature can only affect the duration of the single-phase flow but has little impact on the mass flow rate. Moreover, greater riser height can lead to bigger single-phase flow rate, but nearly has no influence on the long-term two-phase flow and the flashing region.
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