Machine Learning-based Prediction of Departure from Nucleate Boiling Power for the PSBT Benchmark

Conference · Sun Jun 12 04:00:00 EDT 2022

OSTI ID:1856777

Rohatgi, Upendra; Godbole, C; Delipei, G; Wu, X; Avramova, M.

Machine Learning (ML) has seen an exponential growth in its applications due to its advanced data driven prediction capabilities. The study presents a data-driven approach as a preliminary attempt to predict the power at which departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) occurs in pressurized water reactors (PWRs) by constructing an advanced ML algorithm that takes outlet pressure, inlet temperature and inlet mass flux as the input features. DNB is a critical heat flux (CHF) phenomenon seen in PWRs. The experimental data from the PWR subchannel and bundle tests (PSBT) benchmark is first used to train an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the DNB power, which produces a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.89 kW/m when tested on a blind subset of the PSBT data. Since the PSBT dataset is relatively small to train an accurate ANN, a data augmentation methodology based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) is used to expand the training dataset. By assuming that the real data follows a certain distribution, GANs try to learn that underlying distribution to generate similar synthetic data to augment the database and to improve the predictive capabilities of the ANN. The data generated from GANs are validated using 1-nearest neighbor and kernel maximum mean discrepancy. To further ensure data from GAN is similar to PSBT, the data is tested and filtered out using the sub-channel thermal-hydraulic code CTF. The results indicate that with the addition of 120 data points from GAN the RMSE reduces to 4.84 kW/m showing promising results for future developments.

• Research Organization: Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Fuel Cycle Technologies (NE-5)
• DOE Contract Number: SC0012704
• OSTI ID: 1856777
• Report Number(s): BNL-222878-2022-COPA
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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