Integrated Radiation Transport and Thermo-Mechanics Simulation of a PWR Assembly
- ORNL
The Advanced Multi-Physics (AMP) Nuclear Fuel Performance code (AMPFuel) is focused on predicting the temperature and strain within a nuclear fuel assembly to evaluate the performance and safety of existing and advanced nuclear fuel bundles within existing and advanced nuclear reactors. AMPFuel was extended to include an integrated nuclear fuel assembly capability for (one-way) coupled radiation transport and nuclear fuel assembly thermo-mechanics. This capability is the initial step towards incorporating an improved predictive nuclear fuel assembly modeling capability to accurately account for source terms, such as the neutron flux distribution, coolant conditions, and assembly mechanical stresses, of traditional (single-pin) nuclear fuel performance simulation. AMPFuel was used to model an entire 17 x 17 Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel assembly with many of the features resolved in three dimensions (for thermo-mechanics and/or neutronics), including the fuel, gap, and cladding of each of the 264 fuel pins, the 25 guide tubes, top and bottom structural regions, and the upper and lower (neutron) reflector regions. The final full-assembly calculation was executed on Jaguar (Cray XT5) at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility using 40,000 cores in under 10 hours to model over 162 billion degrees of freedom for 10 loading steps.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1043934
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2012 ANS Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, USA, 20120624, 20120628
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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