METHOD AND ARRANGEMENT TO DETERMINE AND INDICATE FAILURES IN THE COOLING SYSTEM IN REACTOR CORES

摘要

1. A method of determining and reporting cooling failures in a fuel element of a reactor core, in particular a sodium cooled, high-speed breeder reactor, where the coolant output temperature (To ) about the fuel element, and also the overall power (P) of the reactor core, the overall primary coolant throughput (W), and the coolant input temperature (Ti ), or other measured values which can be converted into these values, are measured and functionally logic-linked to one another, characterised by the following features : a) the status vector (Xk ) required in order to characterise the status of the fuel element on the basis of a thermo-hydraulic model is estimated, at time intervals DELTA t, in a parameter-adaptive, recursively operating estimating circuit assigned to the fuel element, taking into consideration existing measured values and earlier estimation results ; b) the estimating circuit supplies : estimated status values of the fuel element in question, including both the mean fuel temperature (Tf ) and the mean coolant temperature (Tc ) in the fuel element which either cannot themselves be measured or only with difficulty ; c) the estimated, mean fuel temperature (Tf ) and/or the estimated mean coolant temperature (Tc ) in the fuel element are fed to a theoretical value comparator which triggers a fault message in the event of too great a deviation from a predeterminable theoretical value.