Heat Transfer Engineering, Vol.34, No.14, 1226-1236, 2013
LIVE Experiments on Melt Behavior in the Reactor Pressure Vessel Lower Head
The main objective of the LIVE program at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is to study the core melt phenomena both experimentally in large-scale three-dimensional (3D) geometry and in supporting separate-effects tests, and analytically using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes in order to provide a reasonable estimation of the remaining uncertainty band under the aspect of safety assessment. Within the LIVE experimental program several tests have been performed with water and with noneutectic and eutectic melts (mixtures of KNO3 and NaNO3) as simulant fluids. The results of these experiments, performed in nearly adiabatic and in isothermal conditions, allow a direct comparison with findings obtained earlier in other experimental programs (SIMECO, ACOPO, BALI, etc.) and will be used to assess the correlations derived for the molten pool behavior.