Analysis of PWR-PACTEL Small Break LOCA experiment using TRACE

Currently, the power generation is one of the most significant life aspects for the whole man-kind. Barely one can imagine our life without electricity and thermal energy. Thus, different technologies for producing those types of energy need to be used. Each of those technologies will always have their own advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, every technology must satisfy such requirements as efficiency, ecology safety and reliability. In the matter of the power generation with nuclear energy utilization these requirements needs to be highly main-tained, especially since accidents on nuclear power plants may cause very long term deadly consequences. In order to prevent possible disasters related to the accident on a nuclear power plant strong and powerful algorithms were invented in last decades. Such algorithms are able to manage calculations of different physical processes and phenomena of real facilities. How-ever, the results acquired by the computing must be verified with experimental data.

Scaling analysis of small break experiments in PACTEL

The purpose of this thesis is to study the scalability of small break LOCA experiments. The study is performed on the experimental data, as well as on the results of thermal hydraulic computation performed on TRACE code. The SBLOCA experiments were performed on PACTEL facility situated at LUT. The temporal scaling of the results was done by relating the total coolant mass in the system with the initial break mass flow and using the quotient to scale the experiment time. The results showed many similarities in the behaviour of pressure and break mass flow between the experiments.