Abstract
Hydrogen generated during postulated severe accidents in a sodium-cooled fast reactor may be released to the air inside a reactor containment building, resulting in the hydrogen combustion when a specified hydrogen concentration is exceeded. It is important to evaluate the pressure and temperature response of this phenomenon from the standpoint of the integrity of the reactor containment building. This paper was undertaken to seek an applicability of the hydrogen combustion models incorporated in a CONTAIN-LMR code, which is produced by applying liquid metal fast reactor-specific updates to a light water reactor version of the CONTAIN code. The paper puts its focus on the calculations of premixed combustion experiments using the CONTAIN-LMR code. The results are compared and contrasted with other stand-alone code, HECTR, which often has been used for predicting hydrogen combustion. As a result, the CONTAIN-LMR predictions mostly agree with the measured peak pressure and peak temperature and the HECTR predictions. Therefore, the results indicate that the CONTAIN-LMR code is considered to be applicable to the hydrogen combustion phenomena and available as an evaluation tool for the severe accident scenarios involving hydrogen combustion events.
