Improved Prediction of the Doppler Effect in TRISO Fuel
The Doppler feedback mechanism is a major contributor to the passive safety of gas-cooled, graphite-moderated High Temperature Reactors that use fuel based on TRISO particles. It follows that the correct prediction of the magnitude and time-dependence of this feedback effect is essential to the conduct of safety analyses for these reactors. Since the effect is directly dependent on the actual temperature reached by the fuel during transients, the underlying phenomena of heat transfer and temperature rise must be correctly predicted. This paper presents an improved model for the TRISO particle and its thermal behavior during transients. The improved approach incorporates an explicit TRISO heat conduction model to better quantify the time dependence of the temperature in the various layers of the TRISO particle, including its fuel central zone. There follows a better treatment of the Doppler Effect within said fuel zone. The new model is based on a 1-D analytic solution for composite media using the Green’s function technique. The modeling improvement takes advantage of some of the physical behavior of TRISO fuel under irradiation and includes a distinctive look at the physics of the neutronic Doppler Effect. The new methodology has been implemented within the coupled R-Z nodal diffusion code CYNOD-THERMIX. The new model has been applied to the analysis of earthquakes (presented in a companion paper). In this paper, the model is applied to the control rod ejection event, as specified in the OECD PBMR-400 benchmark, but with temperature dependent thermal properties. The results obtained for this transient using the enhanced code are a considerable improvement over the predictions of the original code. The incorporation of the enhanced model shows that the Doppler Effect plays a more significant role than predicted by the original unenhanced model based on the THERMIX homogenized fuel region model. The new model shows that the overall energy generation during the rod ejection transient is significantly lower than predicted by the unenhanced model. The fuel temperature reaches a slightly higher maximum, but at no time does it approach the nominal allowable TRISO fuel temperature. The analyses with the enhanced model also show that the reactor period during the cool down is larger than previously predicted with the homogenous fuel region model.
- Research Organization:
- Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE - NE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC07-99ID-13727
- OSTI ID:
- 940416
- Report Number(s):
- INL/CON-08-14877; TRN: US0807125
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2009 International Conference on Advances in Mathematics, Computational Methods, and Reactor Physics,Saratoga Springs, New York,05/03/2009,05/07/2009
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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