Evaluations of TiO2 Deposition on Structure Surfaces and Water Radiolysis for the Corrosive Environment in a Reactor Pressure Vessel

Abstract

It is important to avoid a risk of stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of structure materials in nuclear power plants. One of the methods for preventing SCC is titanium-dioxide (TiO2) injection. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst, and injected TiO2 deposits on the surfaces of structure materials, and the deposited TiO2 can decrease the electrochemical corrosion potential (ECP) by irradiation of Cherenkov-light in the reactor. Generally, the ECP is an important indicator about susceptibility to SCC, and ECP-lowering makes a risk of SCC lower. Therefore, initiation and propagation of SCC will be mitigated by the TiO2 injection. The evaluation model for corrosive environment had been already developed. That “conventional” model was consisted of some analysis such as water radiolysis, ECP and others. However, the model did not consider an effect of TiO2 deposition and was one-dimensional simple model. Therefore, to evaluate ECP distribution in a reactor after TiO2 injection, the “newly developed” model was build: analyses integration, high-resolution and three-dimensional model. In this paper, the TiO2 deposition and water radiolysis analyses integrated into flow analysis were contained. Both the deposition and the radiolysis depend on flow in the RPV, so that these analyses were built into the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis model for CFD code. The target plant type for the model was 1100 MWe-class BWR-5. The flow analysis was carried out at steady-state, assuming the TiO2 injection during the rated operation of the plant. Then the TiO2 deposition and the radiolysis analyses were conducted by transient calculations using the result of flow, and the three-dimensional and high resolution results were obtained.