A scoping study on remelting process of a debris bed in the lower head of reactor pressure vessel

Coolability and retention of core melt (corium) in the lower head of reactor pressure vessel (RPV) has been accepted as a severe accident management strategy to maintain the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) integrity of a light water reactor. To qualify the in-vessel melt retention strategy, lots of studies have been performed to investigate the natural convection heat transfer of a melt pool in the lower head. However, little work has been attributed to the precursory phase of the melt pool, i.e., the remelting process of a debris bed which is formed in the lower head at the very beginning of corium relocation from the core the lower head. The present study is motivated to conduct an experimental study on the debris remelting process. For this purpose, a dedicated test facility named COREM (COrium REMelting) is conceived and constructed, which features internal heating of electromagnetic induction and visualization of debris remelting dynamics. The test section is a semicircular vessel representing a slice of scaled-down RPV lower head, whose front and back walls are made of transparent tempered glass which facilitate visualization and induction heating of the debris bed. Fiber probes with multiple optical temperature sensors are mounted in the semicircular wall of the test section to measure its temperature distribution. In the scoping test, n-octanol and Wood's metal are selected as the simulant materials of metallic and oxidic components of corium, respectively, and their particles ware loaded in the test section to form a debris bed. This paper presents the first two scoping tests which have been performed with the COREM facility so far, under different mixing ratios of two debris materials. The measured data include the photography of debris remelting processes and the temperatures in the debris bed and the semicircular wall. Based on the temperature distributions, heat flux profile along the semicircular vessel wall is also estimated. The scoping tests well reproduce the dynamic process of debris remelting, with two distinct stages of fusion of n-octanol and Wood’s metal, i.e., melting successively from low to high melting-point debris particles. During the remelting process, the vessel wall temperatures increase with the polar angle firstly and then decrease gradually, leading to the highest temperature appearing in the middle of the lower layer of the stratified molten pool which is finally formed.