Development of Preliminary VERA-CS Crud Induced Localized Corrosion Modeling Capability
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States)
- Westinghouse Electric Company, Cranberry Township, PA (United States)
The objective of this milestone was to develop a crud-induced localized corrosion (CILC) screening capability in VERA-CS using existing codes and capabilities that had been developed in the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) as part of the efforts to resolve the crud challenge problem. The milestone work focused on improving existing CASL software and implementing clad corrosion modeling into VERA-CS. Clad corrosion modeling was implemented by creating an application interface (API) in the Cicada software so that its clad heat transfer and corrosion models could be used in VERA-CS. Cicada was coupled to the subchannel code CTF for solving crud and corrosion growth. Additionally, a clad corrosion model was added directly to CTF to serve as an alternate approach. The rod thermal hydraulic reconstruction (ROTHCON) process, which is used for capturing computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-predicted rod-surface heat and turbulence behavior that can impact crud-induced power shift (CIPS) and CILC prediction, was also implemented into VERA-CS. Usability improvements were made to this feature, which was developed over several previous milestones, so that the VERA-CS user can link spacer grids in a VERA-CS model to an applicable pregenerated spacer grid data file if available. Several assessments were performed to demonstrate the proper functioning of the new capability. Sensitivity studies were performed to demonstrate the effect of crud lithium content, oxide thermal conductivity, Cicada mesh refinement, and ROTHCON coupling mesh refinement on predicted amounts of crud and oxide growth. A full-scale demonstration was performed by running Seabrook Cycle 5 with the CILC capability. Some general observations were made from the assessments. It was observed that predicted corrosion thickness is less than anticipated for CILC cases, so further work is needed to better understand and improve the corrosion modeling. Refining the coupling mesh in the ROTHCON process leads to increased corrosion and crud thickness, which can affect where crud and corrosion grow, how thick it gets, and how many rods experience crud and corrosion growth. Results indicate that applying the ROTHCON process and refining the coupling mesh leads to only a slight increase in total core maximum crud and corrosion thickness, but it leads to a significant increase in the number of rods with a maximum thickness that surpasses a set threshold value (i.e., more rods grow thicker corrosion and crud). Computational performance of the simulation is degraded by a factor of 5{6 with high coupling mesh refinement. The impact of the ROTHCON coupling mesh refinement on total core crud mass is less significant; however, using the ROTHCON process with CFD-generated data over the Yao{Hochreiter{Leech (YHL) model in CTF leads to significantly different amounts of total core crud mass. Future work on the CILC screening capability will include model improvement and validation, development and testing of a CILC-risk screening criteria, and performance improvements.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1468158
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/TM-2018/924; TRN: US1901797
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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