The Study of CAP1400 Core Melt and Relocation for IVR Analysis

IVR (In-Vessel Retention) strategy is designed as the key severe accident mitigation feature for CAP1400. This paper studies the core melt and relocation progression, which is the base of the melt pool analysis and assessment in the plenum. The MAAP and CFD code are used together to obtain the main insights of the phenomena during core melting. The MAAP code is adopted to have an overall understanding of the progress with the lumped calculation, while the CFD code is used as the tool to study the local failure of the complex structure such as shroud and barrel with finite element simulation. Based on the analysis, the core will heat up after uncovered, and the upper region will melt first to form the core melt pool, as there is still water exist in the active fuel region at the time of upper part rods melting, the debris would be refrozen to form crust to block the relocation. As the melt pool increasing, the shroud is melt-through from the corner, and melts would drop to fill the gap volume between the shroud and barrel before relocation to lower plenum. Furthermore, the barrel will be melted later and the debris relocation to the lower plenum from the core sideward. The melts will touch the lower core support plate before water in the plenum depleted, which provides large mass of metal to be melted into the pool, avoiding large heat flux to challenge the RPV in the pool forming stage.