Aplicação de métodos autorregressivos e coeficientes de Lyapunov para estudos de instabilidades em reatores nucleares

Abstract

Nuclear reactors are susceptible to instability, causing oscillations in reactor power in specific working regions characterized by determined values of power and coolant mass flow. During reactor startup, there is a greater probability that these regions of instability will be present; another reason may be due to transient processes in some reactor parameters. The analysis of the temporal evolution of the power reveals a stable or unstable process after the disturbance in a light water reactor of type BWR (Boiling Water Reactor). In this work, the instability problem was approached in two ways. The first form is based on the ARMA (Autoregressive Moving Average models) model. This model was used to calculate the Decay Ratio (DR) and natural frequency (NF) of the oscillations, parameters that indicate if the one power signal is stable or not. In this sense, the DRARMA code was developed. In the second form, the problems of instability were analyzed using the classical concepts of non-linear systems, such as Lyapunov exponents, phase space and attractors. The Lyapunov exponents quantify the exponential divergence of the trajectories initially close to the phase space and estimate the amount of chaos in a system; the phase space and the attractors describe the dynamic behavior of the system. The main aim of the instability phenomena studies in nuclear reactors is to try to identify points or regions of operation that can lead to power oscillations conditions. The two approaches were applied to two sets of signals. The first set comes from signals of instability events of the commercial Forsmark reactors 1 and 2 and were used to validate the DRARMA code. The second set was obtained from the simulation of transient events of the Peach Bottom reactor; for the simulation, the PARCS and RELAP5 codes were used for the neutronic/thermal hydraulic coupling calculation. For all analyzes made in this work, the Matlab software was used due to its ease of programming and available tools. The methodology developed and used presented satisfactory results in the study of instabilities in BWRs, as demonstrated in this work