Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Whitesides, R..
In this report, building on previous reports issued in FY13 we describe our continued efforts to integrate thermal/hydraulics, neutronics, and structural mechanics modeling codes to perform coupled analysis of a representative fast sodium-cooled reactor core. The focus of the present report is a full core simulation with off-line mesh deformation.
This report describes to employ SHARP to perform a first-of-a-kind analysis of the core radial expansion phenomenon in an SFR. This effort required significant advances in the framework Multi-Physics Demonstration Problem with the SHARP Reactor Simulation Toolkit used to drive the coupled simulations, manipulate the mesh in response to the deformation of the geometry, and generate the necessary modified mesh files. Furthermore, the model geometry is fairly complex, and consistent mesh generation for the three physics modules required significant effort. Fully-integrated simulations of a 7-assembly mini-core test problem have been performed, and the results are presented here. Physics models of a full-core model of the Advanced Burner Test Reactor have also been developed for each of the three physics modules. Standalone results of each of the three physics modules for the ABTR are presented here, which provides a demonstration of the feasibility of the fully-integrated simulation.