Numerical simulation and artificial neural network modeling of natural circulation boiling water reactor

Numerical simulation of natural circulation boiling water reactor is important in order to study its performance for different designs and under various off-design conditions. Numerical simulations can be performed by using thermal-hydraulic codes. Very fast numerical simulations, useful for extensive parametric studies and for solving design optimization problems, can be achieved by using an artificial neural network (ANN) model of the system. In the present work, numerical simulations of natural circulation boiling water reactor have been performed with RELAP5 code for different values of design parameters and operational conditions. Parametric trends observed have been discussed. The data obtained from these simulations have been used to train artificial neural networks, which in turn have been used for further parametric studies and design optimization. The ANN models showed error within ±5% for all the simulated data. Two most popular methods, multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) networks, have been used for the training of ANN model. Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) has been used for optimization.