DOE OSTI2015
The design and the analysis of nuclear power plants (NPPs) require computational codes to predict the behavior of the NPP nuclear components and other systems (i.e., reactor core, primary coolant system, emergency core cooling system, etc.). Coupled calculations are essential to the conduct of deterministic safety assessments. Inasmuch as the physical phenomena that govern the performance of a nuclear reactor are always present simultaneously, ideally computational modeling of a nuclear reactor should include coupled codes that represent all of the active physical phenomena. Such multi-physics codes are under development at several institutions and are expected to become operational in the future. However, in the interim, integrated codes that incorporate modeling capabilities for two to three physical phenomena will remain useful. For example, in the conduct of safety analyses, of paramount importance are codes that couple neutronics and thermal-hydraulics, especially transient codes. Other code systems of importance to safety analyses are those that couple primary system thermal-hydraulics to fission product chemistry, neutronics to fuel performance, containment behavior and structural mechanics to thermal-hydraulics, etc. This paper surveys the methods used traditionally in the coupling of neutronic and thermal-hydraulics codes. The neutron kinetics codes are used for computing the space-time evolution of the neutron flux and, hence, of the power distribution. The thermal-hydraulics codes, which compute mass, momentum and energy transfers, model the coolant flow and the temperature distribution. These codes can be used to compute the neutronic behavior and the thermal-hydraulic states separately. However, the need to account with fidelity for the dynamic feedback between the two sets of properties (via temperature and density effects on the cross section inputs into the neutronics codes) and the requirement to model realistically the transient response of nuclear power plants and to assess the associated emergency systems and procedures imply the necessity of modeling the neutronic and thermal-hydraulics simultaneously within a coupled code system. The focus of this paper is a comparison of the methods by which the coupling between neutron kinetics and thermal-hydraulics treatments has been traditionally achieved in various code systems. As discussed in the last section, the modern approaches to multi-physics code development are beyond the scope of this paper.
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗