Convection of Chemicals and Other Substances with ThermoSysPro

Abstract

Digital twins are a powerful support tool for plant operation: they provide further understanding on ongoing phenomena and allow realistic projection of the current plant state into the future. Among other twins, EDF is developing a digital twin of the chemistry of the secondary circuits of its nuclear plants. Such a tool will give access to the pH in any point of the circuit and in any operating condition (e.g. partial load, power transients...), outperforming the current, limited, monitoring techniques. It is expected to help operators and engineers to better monitor the circuit (e.g. for erosion corrosion) and anticipate the consequences on equipment of different operating strategies (e.g. for amines’ injection pumps maintenance). ThermoSysPro, the EDF R&D’s thermal-hydraulic library, is the bedrock of the tool under development. To meet the needs of the target application, modeling of amines convection and some related chemistry, allowing the computation of pH, are introduced in a new version of the library. Moreover, the presented approach aims at proposing a general framework allowing the convection of custom substances (i.e. easily customized by the end user following its needs). This will open the door for a wide range of other applications: radioactive substances, pollution (e.g. salted water ingress coming from a heat-exchanger leak), just to cite a few, could be modeled in ThermoSysPro to augment the scope of the digital twins.