Three dimensional coupled simulation of thermomechanics, heat, and oxygen diffusion in UO2 nuclear fuel rods
The simulation of nuclear reactor fuel performance involves complex thermomechanical processes between fuel pellets, made of fissile material, and the protective cladding barrier that surrounds the pellets. This paper examines asubset of phenomena that are important in the development of a predictive capability for fuel performance calculations, focusing on thermomechanics and diffusion within UO2 fuel pellets. In this study, correlations from the literature are used for thermal conductivity, specific heat, and oxygen diffusion. This study develops a three dimensional thermomechanical model fully-coupled to an oxygen diffusion model. Both steady state and transient results are examined to compare this three dimensional model with the literature. Further, this equation system is solved in a parallel, fully-coupled, fully-implicit manner using a preconditioned Jacobian-free Newton Krylov method. Numerical results are presented to explore the efficacy of this approach for examining selected fuel performance problems. INL’s BISON fuels performance code is used to perform this analysis.
- Research Organization:
- Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC07-99ID-13727
- OSTI ID:
- 965011
- Report Number(s):
- INL/JOU-08-15115; JNUMAM; TRN: US0903560
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Nuclear Materials, Vol. 392, Issue 1; ISSN 0022-3115
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Fully-coupled engineering and mesoscale simulations of thermal conductivity in UO2 fuel using an implicit multiscale approach
BISON Robustness and Performance Improvements