In order to achieve its fundamental objective, of "paving the way to the future licensing of LFRs and ADSs", PASCAL stands on the ambitious plan of performing high-quality and high-fidelity experiments, providing either direct information to substantiate safety claims for licensing, or matter to validate numerical codes and methods in use for the safety assessment of ALFRED and MYRRHA: the two demonstrators of the LFR and ADS and the top ranking systems in the priority list of the European Sustainable Nuclear Industrial Initiative (ESNII).
According to this plan, having experiments as a backbone, in the first 18 months all activities in every PASCAL work package were made to conceive and prepare the experiments at best.
Extensive literature review provided the essential information for the studies that will be performed on the fuel system, including the identification of the most appropriate simulant for the JOG phase, whose interaction with Lead will be experimentally characterized.
Dedicated models were developed and calibrated, and pre-test analyses conducted, in support of the design of the thermal-hydraulic experiments on the safety of the reactor coolant system, recognizing the early intervention of numerical analyses as an asset for the experiments to maximize their effectiveness in addressing the phenomena of interest.
The mechanisms of formation of aerosols were experimentally investigated. In parallel, a parametric and sensitivity investigation was made on the numerical models that contribute to the analysis of aerosol dispersion. The combination of the experimental results and of the outcomes of the sensitivity study are used to inform the preparation of dispersion and deposition experiments of aerosols.
Pre-test modeling was also extensively used in the preparation of the experiments devoted to confirming the resilience of design choices. The vibratory phenomena potentially challenging the integrity of key structures were analyzed, and the test sections designed so to maximize the ability to capture them, thus to retrieve information for the proper design of these key structures.
Cross-cutting with all technical activities, the rules and procedures for proper communication, dissemination and exploitation of results, as well as for effective education and training, were established inside of the consortium.
