New developments in sodium pool fire and SFR containment aerosol modeling with ASTEC-Na

International audienceBeing able to model sodium pool fires, containment pressurization, and aerosol transport is an essential part of sodium fast reactor safety studies and source term evaluation. This paper describes recent developments to incorporate these capabilities into ASTEC-Na, a sodium-specific severe accident simulation tool currently under development by IRSN. In addition, this paper presents a comprehensive set of historical small, medium, and large-scale sodium fire experiments with which to compare experimental results. The gas temperature, gas pressure, and aerosol concentration predictions produced by the code are compared against this set of 1980’s-era sodium pool fire experiments. The code and experiments tend to agree fairly well for temperatures and pressures. There are some important discrepancies for the aerosol concentration, but these tend to be more during the cool down phase of an experiment after the fire had been extinguished. That being said, important areas for improvement have been identified that can be implemented in the ASTEC-Na in the future, e.g., new models the aerosol generation rates, are discussed. © 2018 Elsevier Lt