Coupled Ablation and Heat Transfer Analysis of Lower Head for Reactor Pressure Vessel under Severe Accident Condition

After a reactor core melts accident, the solid wall of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) will be inevitably eroded by the melting core which contains large density of heat flux. The analysis of the coupled ablation and heat transfer of the lower head for RPV is of great theoretical significance to the effectiveness demonstration of water injection in reactor pit and the confirmation of the residual wall thickness of RPV. In this work, numerical simulations were carried out based on the RPV model of CPR1000 using the CFD software FLUENT 17.2. Based on dynamic mesh model and user-defined function (UDF) redevelopment, a fully coupling calculation model considering the transient ablation and heat conduction of solid wall of RPV, the redistribution of heat flux density in RPV inner wall and the subcooled boiling of RPV outer wall was established. Both two-phase flow pattern in the reactor pit and temperature field of RPV solid wall ablation within 9 000 s were obtained and the minimum residual wall thickness and the occurrence location were determined by analysis. The results show that it is feasible to use dynamic mesh to capture wall ablation. The fully coupling calculation model has certain advantages in analyzing the transient ablation process of RPV under severe accident.