Superphénix Benchmark Part II: Transient Results

Abstract

The paper presents a transient simulation phase of the new benchmark on a large sodium fast reactor (SFR). This phase of the benchmark is devoted to the modeling of selected operational transients performed during startup tests of the French SFR Superphénix. Six operational transients were selected for the analysis. The specifications of a simplified thermal hydraulic model equipped with point kinetics reactivity data and boundary conditions for the selected transients are given in the paper. The developed model contains a necessary thermal hydraulic description of the primary system components, assumptions to account for thermal expansion reactivity feedback from out-of-core structures, neutron kinetics parameters, power distribution, and reactivity coefficients. The neutronic input parameters were obtained with the help of the Monte Carlo code serpent during the first phase of the benchmark related to the static neutronic characterization of the core. In this study, the solution of the transient benchmark was obtained with three thermal hydraulic system codes, namely, TRACE, SIM-SFR, and ATHLET. The numerical results, compared to the available experimental data, exhibit a reasonable mutual agreement. Particular discrepancies between calculations and experiments could not be fully resolved. Therefore, a set of recommendations for achieving an improved agreement was proposed. In general, the proposed transient benchmark can be seen as an effective tool for validation and cross comparisons of system codes applied for safety analyses of SFRs, including approbation and comparison of different modeling features for thermal expansion of the out-of-core structures.