Development of a Physics-Based Monitoring Algorithm Detecting CO2 Ingress Accidents in a Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor

One of the benefits of the supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle in Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors is an enhanced plant safety, since potential reactions of CO2 with liquid sodium have been reported to be less stringent than a sodium-water reaction found in the Rankine cycle. However, moderate chemical interactions between CO2 and liquid sodium make detecting CO2 ingress accidents harder. Thus, this paper proposes a new physics-based detection algorithm by comparing the real-time pressure measurements of two identical heat exchangers for the early detection. The CO2 ingress occurs owing to a crack at the pressure boundary wall, a certain self-recovery of structural damage does not happen over time, and an accident probabilistically starts at only one component of two. The proposed physics-based method with the probabilistic analysis was compared to the pure data-based method. Finally, the damage degradation was developed with a simplified mass and energy transfer model, and the proposed algorithm was verified with experimental data. The results show that a 99.99% detection probability can be achieved for the air ingress of 30 cc/s, which is equivalent to the 0.12 g/s CO2 ingress, in a 70 s detection time, limiting down to 0.1% false alarms due to sensor noise.