Verification of Nonlinear Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Reduced Order Modeling for BWR Fuel Assemblies

Abstract

Thermal-hydraulic coupling between power, flow rate and density, intensified by neutronics feedback are the main drivers of boiling water reactor (BWR) stability behavior. Studying potential power oscillations require focusing on BWR operation at high-power low-flow conditions interacting with unfavorable power distribution. Current design rules assure admissible operation conditions by exclusion regions determined by numerical calculations and analytical methods. Analyzing an exhaustive parameter space of the non-linear BWR system becomes feasible with methodologies based on reduced order models (ROMs) saving computational cost and improving the physical understanding. A general reduction technique is given by the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). Model-specific options and aspects of the POD-ROM-methodology are considered. A first verification is illustrated by means of a chemical tubular reactor (TR) setup. Experimental and analytical results for natural convection in a closed circuit (NCC) [1, 2] serve as a second verification example. This setup shows a strongly non-linear character. The implemented model is validated by means of a linear stability map. Transient behavior of the NCC-POD-ROM can not only reproduce the input data but rather predict different states.