Publications Details
MELCOR 1.8.3 assessment: GE large vessel blowdown and level swell experiments
MELCOR is a fully integrated, engineering-level computer code, being developed at Sandia National Laboratories for the USNRC, that models the entire spectrum of severe accident phenomena in a unified framework for both BWRs and PWRS. As part of an ongoing assessment program, the MELCOR computer code has been used to analyze a series of blowdown tests performed in the early 1980s at General Electric. The GE large vessel blowdown and level swell experiments are a set of primary system thermal/hydraulic separate effects tests studying the level swell phenomenon for BWR transients and LOCAS; analysis of these GE tests is intended to validate the new implicit bubble separation algorithm added since the release of MELCOR 1.8.2. Basecase MELCOR results are compared to test data, and a number of sensitivity studies on input modelling parameters and options have been done. MELCOR results for these experiments also are compared to MAAP and TRAC-B qualification analyses for the same tests. Time-step and machine-dependency calculations were done to identify whether any numeric effects exist in our GE large vessel blowdown and level swell assessment analyses.