Publications Details
MELCOR 1.8.2 assessment: Aerosol experiments ABCOVE AB5, AB6, AB7, and LACE LA2
The MELCOR computer code has been used to model four of the large-scale aerosol behavior experiments conducted in the Containment System Test Facility (CSTF) vessel. Tests AB5, AB6 and AB7 of the ABCOVE program simulate the dry aerosol conditions during a hypothetical severe accident in an LMFBR. Test LA2 of the LACE program simulates aerosol behavior in a condensing steam environment during a postulated severe accident in an LWR with failure to isolate the containment. The comparison of code results to experimental data show that MELCOR is able to correctly predict most of the thermal-hydraulic results in the four tests. MELCOR predicts reasonably well the dry aerosol behavior of the ABCOVE tests, but significant disagreements are found in the aerosol behavior modelling for the LA2 experiment. These results tend to support some of the concerns about the MELCOR modelling of steam condensation onto aerosols expressed in previous works. During these analyses, a limitation in the MELCOR input was detected for the specification of the aerosol parameters for more than one component. A Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) sensitivity study of the aerosol dynamic constants is presented for test AB6. The study shows the importance of the aerosol shape factors in the aerosol deposition behavior, and reveals that MELCOR input/output processing is highly labor intensive for uncertainty and sensitivity analyses based on LHS.