Impact of Steady-State Critical-Flow Errors on Transient Blowdown Predictions

Determine whether the steady-state critical-flow errors in the TAMPINES homogeneous-equilibrium-model solver are sufficiently large to compromise transient Edwards pipe blowdown predictions.

Background

The paper validates the TAMPINES steady-state homogeneous-equilibrium critical-flow routines against digitized Moody and Zaloudek data, reporting generally acceptable trends but residual failures and discrepancies near the bubble-point kink. The authors then use the Edwards pipe blowdown as a transient test to assess the practical consequences of those steady-state errors.

At the point where the question is raised, the authors describe only preliminary solver results and explicitly state that rigorous derivation is outside the paper’s scope. The unresolved issue is therefore whether the steady-state inaccuracies materially affect transient nuclear-thermal-hydraulic behavior.