Digitalization, Management, and Synthesis of Thermal-Hydraulic Legacy Data Using the Dynamical System Scaling

A unique attribute of the nuclear industry is the extent by which designers, developers, operators, and regulators pay attention to demonstrating the safety case. Nuclear installation resiliency or safety takes overriding priority over function and performance. The preparation of the safety case heavily relies on extensive experimental campaigns that challenge the target design under a spectrum of postulated accident scenarios. For safety reasons, these experiments, typically conducted in subscale test apparatuses intended to reproduce the postulated accident scenarios and event sequences realistically, but subject to proven similarity criteria, are often referred to as scaling analyses. Since the dawn of the nuclear industry, significant resources have been committed to the construction and operation of such test facilities, and a massive amount of data has been generated. Such test data have been and are still used to validate the fundamental assumptions of nuclear power plant phenomena.