Functional Reliability Investigation on Capacity of Reactor Core Natural Circulation Cooling in XAPR Under MLOCA

Due to the epistemic uncertainties involved in the numerical values of its parameters and its modeling, the system may not accomplish its function as required. Functional failure becomes an important factors in the natural circulation system operation failure, which needs to be considered in the system reliability analysis. In order to solve the problem of multi-dimensional uncertainty parameters and small functional failure probability of passive systems, an efficient functional reliability estimation method based on improved response surface and importance sampling subset simulation was presented. This method was applied in natural circulation cooling in XAPR reactor core. Combined with MLOCA, the uncertainties related to the input parameters and the model were considered. And then the probability of functional failure and the sensitivity measures were estimated with the combination of response surface method and importance sampling subset simulation method. The assessment results show that the functional failure probability is 3.796 × 10−3, and it is fully considered the functional failure in the passive system reliability analysis. Meanwhile, this method has high computed efficiency and excellent computed accuracy compared with traditional probability analysis methods, and it is robust to nonlinear functional function of XAPR.