Development of a Multi-Compartment Containment thermal hydraulic code: PARIRODHAN

• Published in: Nuclear engineering and design 2022-11, Vol.398, p.111944, Article 111944
• Main Authors: Mittal, Dharmanshu, Gokhale, Onkar S., Kumar, Mithilesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accident; Accident conditions; Benchmarks; Blowdown; Containment; Fluid flow; Heat transport; Hydraulics; Thermal hydraulic; Transportation systems
• ISSN: 0029-5493; 1872-759X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nucengdes.2022.111944

•A multi-compartment containment thermal–hydraulic code (named PARIRODHAN) is developed.•The code is generic and provides the flexibility to the user to decide the number of compartments, junctions and associated wall structures.•The code uses a pressure implicit scheme to solve conservation equations to obtain a stable and computationally efficient solution.•Other explicitly coupled models include Flashing model, critical flow model, pool evaporation model and vent thermal hydraulic model.•The code has been verified by comparing the code calculation with numerical (RELAP5/MOD3.2) and experimental (Containment Studies Facility (CSF) Experiment and Marviken Full Scale Containment Experiment-Blowdown 18) results.•Overall the results predicted by the code are in good agreement with the reference results. The development of a multi-compartment containment thermal–hydraulic code (named PARIRODHAN) is presented in this paper. It provides the capability to predict the containment thermal hydraulics along with steam and non-condensable transport inside a containment building that follows after the release of mass and energy from the heat transport system during postulated accident conditions. The code is generic and provides the flexibility to the user to decide the number of compartments, junctions and associated wall structures. The code uses a pressure implicit scheme to obtain a stable and computationally efficient solution. It has been verified by comparing the code calculation with numerical and experimental results. Some benchmarking studies largely affecting the containment thermal-hydraulics are also presented in the paper. The benchmarking results show the capability of the code in simulating containment behaviour under blowdown conditions.