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Kwang-Il Ahn , Sun-Hee Park, Hee-Dong Kim, Hyun Sun Park
Nuclear Engineering and Design, Volume 249, August 2012
Abstract
In nuclear power plant, an ex-vessel steam explosion has been considered as one of the most challenging severe accident phenomena to the integrity of the reactor cavity and containment of a nuclear power plant, due to its rapid and dynamic characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to provide plant-specific uncertainty analysis results on the ex-vessel steam explosion-induced pressure loads, which can be used as key input to assess the conditional failure probability if the fragility structures of interest is provided. The APR1400, a two-loop pressurized water reactor, has been selected as a reference plant for the uncertainty analysis. For the purpose, a comprehensive uncertainty analysis has been performed for key thermal-hydraulic conditions of the reactor pressure vessel and cavity which can highly influence on influence on these pressure loads and with the help of a coupling of a steam explosion analysis code (TEXAS-V) and a sampling-based uncertainty quantification code (SAUNA). In order to get a more robust conclusion on the analysis results, various sensitivity analyses have been applied to both probability types (e.g., normal and uniform PDF) and sampling schemes (e.g., random and Latin Hypercube sampling). Key contributors (i.e., physical and model parameters) to the underlying pressure loads have been determined by assessing the six currently available types of importance measures.
A Statistical Approach for Uncertainty Assessment
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