EU-ERCOSAM PROJECT, scaling from nuclear power plant to experiments

Abstract

International audience ; In case of a severe accident in a light water nuclear reactor, hydrogen would be produced duringreactor core degradation and released into the reactor building. The stratification of the released hydrogen in the reactor containment could lead to local pockets of gas mixtures of high hydrogen concentration and, in case ofcombustion, to high pressure loads which might challenge the containment structural integrity.The objectives of ERCOSAM and SAMARA projects, co-funded by the European Union and the Russia, are to investigate hydrogen concentration build-up and break-up due to safety components operations, as sprays, coolers and Passive Auto-catalytic Recombiners (PARs).For this purpose, various experiments addressing accident scenarios scaled down from existing plant calculations to different thermal-hydraulics facilities (TOSQAN, MISTRA, PANDA, SPOT) are considered. This paper describes the work performed in framework of the workpackage WP1 of the ERCOSAM project and presents theadopted methodology to scale down the real plant calculations results, provided by the projects partners, to the experimental facilities.