Gleicher, F. N. | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2016

Initial Testing of the Microscopic Depletion Implementation in the MAMMOTH Reactor Physics Application

Present and new nuclear fuels that will be tested at the Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility will be analyzed with the MAMMOTH reactor physics application, currently under development, at Idaho National Laboratory. MAMMOTH natively couples the BISON, RELAP-7, and Rattlesnake applications within the MOOSE framework. This system allows the irradiation of fuel from beginning of life in a nuclear reactor until it is placed in TREAT for fuel testing within the same analysis mesh and, thus, retaining a very high level of resolution and fidelity. The calculation of the isotopic distribution in fuel requires the solution to the decay and transmutation equations coupled to the neutron transport equation. The Chebyshev Rational Approximation Method (CRAM) is the current state-of-the-art in the field, as was chosen to be the solver for the decay and transmutation equations. This report shows that the implementation of the CRAM solver within MAMMOTH is correct with various analytic benchmarks for decay and transmutation of nuclides. The results indicate that the solutions with CRAM order 16 achieve the level of precision of the benchmark. The CRAM solutions show little sensitivity to the time step size and consistently produce a high level of accuracy for isotopic decay for time steps of 1x10^11 years. Comparisons to DRAGON5 with 297 isotopes yield comparable results, but some differences need to be further analyzed.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2015

Advanced multiphysics coupling for LWR fuel performance analysis

Even the most basic nuclear fuel analysis is a multiphysics undertaking, as a credible simulation must consider at a minimum coupled heat conduction and mechanical deformation. The need for more realistic fuel modeling under a variety of conditions invariably leads to a desire to include coupling between a more complete set of the physical phenomena influencing fuel behavior, including neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and mechanisms occurring at lower length scales. This paper covers current efforts toward coupled multiphysics LWR fuel modeling in three main areas. The first area covered in this paper concerns thermomechanical coupling. The interaction of these two physics, particularly related to the feedback effect associated with heat transfer and mechanical contact at the fuel/clad gap, provides numerous computational challenges. An outline is provided of an effective approach used to manage the nonlinearities associated with an evolving gap in BISON, a nuclear fuel performance application. A second type of multiphysics coupling described here is that of coupling neutronics with thermomechanical LWR fuel performance. DeCART, a high-fidelity core analysis program based on the method of characteristics, has been coupled to BISON. DeCART provides sub-pin level resolution of the multigroup neutron flux, with resonance treatment, during a depletion or a fast transient simulation. Two-way coupling between these codes was achieved by mapping fission rate density and fast neutron flux fields from DeCART to BISON and the temperature field from BISON to DeCART while employing a Picard iterative algorithm. Finally, the need for multiscale coupling is considered. Fission gas production and evolution significantly impact fuel performance by causing swelling, a reduction in the thermal conductivity, and fission gas release. The mechanisms involved occur at the atomistic and grain scale and are therefore not the domain of a fuel performance code. However, it is possible to use lower length scale models such as those used in the mesoscale MARMOT code to compute average properties, e.g. swelling or thermal conductivity. These may then be used by an engineering-scale model. Examples of this type of multiscale, multiphysics modeling are shown.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗