Interface temperature between solid and liquid corium in severe accident situations: A comprehensive study of characteristic time delay needed for reaching liquidus temperature Original Research Article

Tliquidus was proposed as the interface temperature (), for various severe accident situations for thermalhydraulic steady state. This proposal was made on the basis of the analysis of solidification front stability in thermalhydraulic steady state for volumetrically heated corium pools and was extended to reactor transients with slow solidification rates that are controlled by the long-term decrease in residual power. The conclusions were corroborated by prototypic corium and variable solidification rates obtained by experimental approaches () for corium containing small amounts of silica or none at all. When the concentration in silica increases (approximately above 10 wt%), it was concluded from the experiments that a plane-front situation could not be obtained.