Development of Lagrangian particle method for temperature distribution formed by sodium-water reaction in a tube bundle system

Kosaka, Wataru  ; Uchibori, Akihiro ; Okano, Yasushi; Yanagisawa, Hideki*

The leakage of pressurized water from a steam generator (SG) and the progress after that are a key issue in the safety assessment or design of a SG in sodium-cooled fast reactor. The analysis code LEAP-III can evaluate a rate of water leakage during the long-term event progress, i.e., from the self-wastage initiated by an occurrence of a microscopic crack in a tube wall to the water leak detection and water/water-vapor blowdown. Since LEAP-III consists of semi-empirical formulae and one-dimensional equations of conservation, it has an advantage in short computation time. Thus, LEAP-III can facilitate the exploration of various new SG designs in the development of innovative reactors. However, there are several problems, such as an excessive conservative result in some case and the need for numerous experiments or preliminary analyses to determine tuning parameters of models in LEAP-III. Hence, we have developed a Lagrangian particle method code, which is characterized by a simpler computational principle and faster calculation. In this study, we have improved the existing particle pair search method for interparticle interaction in this code and developed an alternative model without the pair search. Through the trial analysis simulating in a tube bundle system, it was confirmed that new models reduced the computation time. In addition, it was shown that representative temperatures of the heat-transfer tubes evaluated by this particle method code, which is used to predict the tube failure in LEAP-III, were good agreement with that by SERAPHIM, which is a detailed mechanistic analysis method code.