L-3 MAPPS has announced that it has been granted a contract extension from the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) to further update its SOFIA (Simulateur d’Observation du Fonctionnement Incidentel et Accidentel) engineering simulator.
“L-3 MAPPS is pleased to continue our business relationship with IRSN,” said Michael Chatlani, vice president of marketing and sales for L-3 MAPPS Power Systems and Simulation. “For seven years, IRSN has turned to us to meet its demanding simulation needs, and we are proud that our technology and simulation know-how has gained such strong acceptance with a discerning customer.”
The contract extension requires that L-3 MAPPS migrate the existing simulations for French-designed reactors CP2 (900MWe, three-loop), DPY (1,300MWe, four-loop) and N4 (1,450MWe, four-loop) to new PC servers running Windows within the Orchid® simulation environment. Each of the simulations benefits from being integrated with CATHARE thermal-hydraulic computer engineering code. In addition, two versions of the Flamanville 3-based EPR™ simulation will be added to the SOFIA simulator. One EPR simulation version is based on L-3 MAPPS’ real-time ANTHEM™ thermal-hydraulic code, while the other incorporates CATHARE.
IRSN has owned a simulator since 1992. The SOFIA simulator (previously SIPA – simulateur post-accidentel) is used for thermal-hydraulic studies, especially for level two probabilistic safety analyses, training in physics and reactor control, and the preparation of national crisis exercise scenarios. Since 2002, IRSN has owned a CP1 (900MWe, three-loop) configuration that integrates the CATHARE code and makes the simulation of cold shutdown states possible. In 2003, the IRSN worked with L-3 MAPPS to design a solution that integrated CATHARE in L-3 MAPPS’ ROSE® simulation environment, which resulted in a successful prototype.
CATHARE is a thermal-hydraulic computer engineering code for nuclear power plant safety analysis. The software is the result of nearly three decades of cooperation between engineers of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), French electricity group EDF, AREVA and the IRSN. The version of the code in use for the simulators is CATHARE 2, version 2.5_1.