Experimental and numerical investigation on the pressure pulsation in reactor coolant pumps under different inflow conditions

A reactor coolant pump (RCP) is essential for transporting coolant in the primary loop of pressurized water reactors. In the advanced passive reactor, the absence of a long pipeline between the steam generator and RCP serves as a transition section, resulting in a non-uniform flow field at the pump inlet. Therefore, the characteristics of the pump should be investigated under non-uniform flow to determine its influence on the pump. In this study, the pressure pulsation characteristics were examined in the time and frequency domains, and the sources of low-frequency and high-amplitude signals were analyzed using wavelet coherence analysis and numerical simulation. From computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results, non-uniform inflow has a great effect on the flow structures in the pump's inlet. The pressure pulsation in the pump at the rated flow increased by 78–128.7% under the non-uniform inflow condition in comparison with that observed under the uniform inflow condition. Furthermore, a low-frequency signal with a high amplitude was observed, whose energy increased significantly under non-uniform flow. The wavelet coherence and CFD analysis verified that the source of this signal was the low-frequency pulsating vortex under the steam generator.