Assessment of the Reactor Pressure Vessel Integrity in PTS Conditions.Presentation and Demonstration of SECURE, a Numerical Tool Developed by EDF to Realise Automatically Integrity Assessments

摘要

The reactor pressure vessel (RPV) is an essential component liable to limit the lifetime duration of PWR nuclear power plants. For the RPV assessment and Lifetime evaluation of the nuclear plants, French Utility applies a series of calculations including different approaches, more or less refined. These approaches combine different types of data : neutron physics, vessel geometry, material data, thermal and mechanical transients.SECURE, a numerical tool based on EDF finite element code, codeAster, and full data bases was developed by EDF in order to make automatically RPV integrity assessment with simplified approaches (ID computations) and more refined approaches (2D and 3D computations). Then, with this tool, RPV integrity studies are made more quickly and with more reliability.This paper describes SECURE tool and presents an application with more and less refined methods on a 3D thermal computation of a transient. This application shows that this tool allowed to do easily refined numerical methods which improve the final margins.This tool, developed and validate by EDF Research and development division, must now be used by engineering division.