The ESFR-SMART European project (Contract No. 754501) focuses on the development of innovative safety design options for European sodium-cooled fast reactor (ESFR). The task of Work Package 1.3 is to assess the impact of the new safety measures on the reactor behavior in the transients protected by either active or passive reactor shutdown systems. The aim of Task 4 in this Work Package is to evaluate the passive reactor shutdown system performance in the ESFR core. This paper deals with the results of this evaluation, which is based on the analysis of four transients passively protected by 12 diversified shutdown device (DSD) rods. Simulations have been done with the SIM-SFR system code and demonstrated that DSD rods are capable to shut down ESFR in a timely manner, in order to avoid the negative consequences of the analyzed transients. Although a total loss of heat sink transient is a practically eliminated event, it was included in the analysis to estimate the grace time before the core meltdown.