Application of Water Properties Table Lookup Method to Development of Thermal-Hydraulic Analysis Code in Real-time for Plate Type Fuel Reactor

A multi-channel model thermal-hydraulic analysis code in real time is development for plate type fuel reactor. In this code, every fuel assembly in reactor is divided into a subchannel and every subchannel is divided into several control volumes in axial direction. So in the reactor core there are too many control volumes and computation speed can not meet the requirement of real time calculation. With review of execution time of every subroutine, it is found that the module for water-steam properties calculation consumes about ninety percent cputime of the whole program when the set of IAPWS-97 formulas are applied for calculation of water-steam properties. Then table lookup method is introduced for calculation of properties. The results show that the computation speed is enhanced largely and it can meet requirement of real time. The accuracy of results is equivalent to the former results which are obtained by formulas calculation method.