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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Nuclear Reactor Design
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnuen.2025.1516841
This article is part of the Research Topic Expert Opinions and Perspectives in Fission and Reactor Design View all articles

Reliability Analysis of Passive Residual Heat Removal System for Large Advanced Pressurized Water Reactors

Provisionally accepted
天睿 李 天睿 李 *鑫坤 肖 鑫坤 肖 国庆 卢 国庆 卢 时康 陈 时康 陈 Ronghua Chen Ronghua Chen *Wenxi TIAN Wenxi TIAN
  • School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shanxi, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper focuses on the passive residual heat removal system of a typical large advanced pressurized water reactor, analyzing its design, performance, and reliability during station blackout conditions combined with the failure of the auxiliary feedwater steam-driven pumps. The study employs modeling of passive safety systems and utilizes response surface methodology to evaluate system behavior during severe accident scenarios. Such comprehensive analysis contributes to ensuring the safe operation and advancement of nuclear power plants. The best-estimate program VITARS is used to analyze and calculate accident scenarios, with sensitivity analysis conducted based on preliminary thermal-hydraulic calculations to optimize parameter selection and simplify the response surface model structure, thereby streamlining the analysis process. An artificial neural network is employed as a surrogate model for complex thermal-hydraulic calculations, significantly improving analysis efficiency.The findings indicate that the passive residual heat removal system has zero failure probability under normal uncertainty ranges within 72 hours. Even under extreme conditions, such as delayed opening of the steam generator's safety valve, the system maintains reactor safety with a failure probability of only 0.035%.

    Keywords: Passive residual heat removal system, response surface, artificial neural network, reliability analysis, Latin hyper cube (LHC) sampling

    Received: 25 Oct 2024; Accepted: 06 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 李, 肖, 卢, 陈, Chen and TIAN. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    天睿 李, School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shanxi, China
    Ronghua Chen, School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shanxi, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.