Thermal-hydraulic characteristics of offshore nuclear reactors are influenced by various platform motions caused by ocean conditions. The effects of platform motions on thermal-hydraulic characteristics of the reactor system are necessary to be taken into account, which are important for design and operation of offshore nuclear reactors. Due to military security or company proprietary，the researches in this field are quite limited. In this paper, the study on the effects of rolling motion on forced circulation and natural circulation was conducted. As the conventional thermal-hydraulic system code are designed for the land-based reactor, a system analysis code for ocean conditions was developed. The code was validated by natural circulation tests at inclined attitude and natural circulation tests under rolling motion. The predicted flow rates of the core and loops agree well with the experimental data, and this indicates that the code has the ability to analyze the reactor system under ocean conditions. The code was used to study the effects of rolling motion on the thermal-hydraulic performance of the offshore nuclear reactor system. The results show that the effects of ocean conditions on natural circulation characteristics are larger than that on forced circulation characteristics. The spatial layout of the nuclear system has a great influence on its resistance to ocean conditions. The natural circulation capability decreases and the thermal-hydraulic parameters oscillates under the periodic ocean conditions, and the amplitudes of the parameter oscillations increase with the amplitudes of ocean conditions. Under rolling condition with a fixed amplitude, there is a rolling period with minimal system parameter oscillations.


Effects of Rolling on Characteristics of System Under Forced Circulation and Natural Circulation

Division / Sponsors: 
Power Division & Nuclear Engineering Division (NED)

Power Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/POWER/POWER2020/volume/83747

International Conference on Nuclear Engineering
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICONE/ICONE2020/volume/83761

POWER-ICONE - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.