A Reactor Water Level and Pressure Prediction Method Under Small Loss-of-Coolant-Accident Conditions in Boiling Water Reactors

An on-line method of predicting reactor water level and pressure under small loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) conditions has been proposed. The method features initialization of a simplified reactor model in transient conditions. This is done by using plant data in time series and estimating unknown parameters, such as break area, by a nonlinear optimization method. Off-line simulations were performed for small LOCAs (break area: ∼100 cm²) using the results of a reference LOCA analysis code for plant data. These showed that the difference from the reference calculation during a 10-min period was within 10%, normalized by the value at the initialization time, and the estimation error for break area was below 11%. The overall CPU time required for the prediction was below 10 s in a general purpose computer of 10 million instructions per second.