Ringhals Diagnostics and Monitoring, Annual Research Report 2015

Report, 2015

This report gives an account of the work performed by the Division of Subatomic and Plasma Physics (former Division of Nuclear Engineering), Chalmers, in the frame of a research collaboration with Ringhals, Vattenfall AB, contract No. 630217-031. The contract constitutes a 1-year co-operative research work concerning diagnostics and monitoring of the BWR and PWR units. The work in the contract has been performed between January 1st 2015, and December 31st, 2015. During this period, we have worked with five main items as follows:

1. Development of the mode separation model with an extension to describe 3-D core barrel vibrations;

2. Analysis of new ex-core measurements, taken in R-4 after power uprate;

3. Investigation of the correctness of the hypothesis that the reactivity component extracted from the ex-core detector signals can be due to fuel assembly vibrations with CORE SIM;

4. A basic study in neutron noise theory which could provide some indirect support for the determination of the void fraction from neutron noise measurements;

5. A preliminary study of the possibility of modelling 3-dimensional fuel assembly vibrations in a realistic PWR system with the CORE SIM simulator.

This work was performed at the Nuclear Engineering Group of the Division of Subatomic and Plasma Physics, Chalmers University of Technology by Victor Dykin (project co-ordinator), Cristina Montalvo (visitor from the Technical University of Madrid), Hoai-Nam Tran (research collaborator from Duy Tan University), Imre Pázsit and Henrik Nylén, who was also the contact person at Ringhals.