Thermal-hydraulic modeling of a boiling water reactor scale model developed for training, education, and research

Core components of a BWR physical model are designed. The BWR physical model operates with a slight vacuum condition in the simulated fuel with mass flow rate of 3.16x10^-4 kg/sec and total power of 0.075 kW. The static instability of the fuel cooling channel, and critical heat flux for the heaters are establish to assure safe normal operating conditions. An upper plenum and a steam separator are designed for liquid recirculation and dry steam requirements, respectively. The heaters, steam separator, and upper plenum designs are tested in the BWR physical model and perform consistent with expectations. A thermal-hydraulic simulation program that allows use of equilibrium, non-equilibrium and void-reactivity feedback models is developed for the BWR physical model. The program is benchmarked against a previous channel integral model from the literature and the RELAP5/MOD3 code. The thermal-hydraulic program provides reasonable simulation of slow transients based on the results of the benchmarks.