Reduced model of a nuclear reactor and its use for teaching Nuclear Engineering courses

In the Bachelor’s degree of Energy Engineering, students can attend to Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Safety courses. Both subjects are focused on the reactor design to assure the nuclear power plant operates in safe conditions. The use of mathematical models to reproduce the power generated and other plant safety variables helps the students to understand the nuclear power reactor operation. In this work, a simple model of a Pressurized Water Reactor that allows to represent the temporal evolution of the reactor power and the temperatures of the most important plant components is presented. The point kinetics model is used to obtain the power generated inside the core, while a simple heat transfer model is used to calculate the fuel and coolant temperatures. In this way, the problem is formulated as a system of ordinary differential equations that is solved using numerical methods. The development of the model allows the students of Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Safety to understand the temporal evolution of some of the reactor variables and to become aware of the stabilization effect of the thermohydraulic parameters over the generated power.