STATUS OF VERIFICATION VALIDATION OF AREVA'S ARCADIA® CODE SYSTEM FOR PWR APPLICATIONS

摘要

In March 2010 the submittal of Topical Reports for ARCADIA® and COBRA-FLX, the thermal-hydraulic module of ARCADIA®, to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) concluded a major step in the development of AREVA's new code system for core design and safety analyses. This submittal was dedicated to the application of the code system to uranium fuel in pressurized water reactors. The submitted information comprised results for plants operated in the US, France and Germany and provided uncertainties for in-core measuring systems with traveling in-core detectors and for the aeroball system of the EPR. A reduction of the uncertainties in the prediction of F_(ΔH) and F_Q of > 1 % (absolute) was derived compared to the current code systems. This paper extents the verification and validation base for uranium based fuel and demonstrates the basic capabilities of ARCADIA® of describing MOX. The achieved status of verification and validation is described in detail. All applications followed the same standard without any specific calibration. The paper gives also insight in the new capability of 3D full core steady-state and transient pin-by-pin/sub-channel-by-sub-channel calculations and the opportunities offered by this feature. The gain of margins with increasing detail of the representation is outlined. Currently, the strategies for worldwide implementation of ARCADIA® are developed.