Development of numerical simulation method to evaluate molten material behaviors in nuclear reactors

Yamashita, Susumu   ; Yoshida, Hiroyuki  

In order to simulate the relocation phenomena phenomenologically around the reactor core and inside pedestal without assumptions, inputted information, empirical knowledge and given scenarios, a numerical simulation code based on computational fluid dynamics, JUPITER, that can phenomenologically evaluate the melting phenomena has been developed in JAEA. We confirm the applicability of JUPITER to the corium spreading process inside the pedestal by simulating corium spreading behaviors and its distributions under several parameters such as the corium inflow condition. And we investigated detailed fuel debris distribution inside the pedestal and the cavity named sump pit located on the lower part of PCVs, that is distribution for each component of core materials such as stainless steel (SUS), bron carbide (BC), zircaloy (Zry) and uranium dioxide (UO). As a result, since JUPITER uses interface capturing scheme which can treat complicated behavior of interfaces such as a large deformation and a complicated separation among interfaces, the corium was spread with complicated mixing behavior and the distribution of fuel debris tend to accumulate complicatedly inside sump pits. Since existing SA analysis codes difficult to treat such complicated phenomena and the complicated fuel distribution, those result might be contributed to an understanding of circumstances inside PCV and, ultimately, also contributed to reactor decommissioning process.