The coupling of the neutron transport application RATTLESNAKE to the nuclear fuels performance application BISON under the MOOSE framework

Conference · Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014

OSTI ID:1177214

Gleicher, Frederick N.; Williamson, Richard L.; Ortensi, Javier; Wang, Yaqi; Spencer, Benjamin W.; Novascone, Stephen R.; Hales, Jason D.; Martineau, Richard C.

The MOOSE neutron transport application RATTLESNAKE was coupled to the fuels performance application BISON to provide a higher fidelity tool for fuel performance simulation. This project is motivated by the desire to couple a high fidelity core analysis program (based on the self-adjoint angular flux equations) to a high fidelity fuel performance program, both of which can simulate on unstructured meshes. RATTLESNAKE solves self-adjoint angular flux transport equation and provides a sub-pin level resolution of the multigroup neutron flux with resonance treatment during burnup or a fast transient. BISON solves the coupled thermomechanical equations for the fuel on a sub-millimeter scale. Both applications are able to solve their respective systems on aligned and unaligned unstructured finite element meshes. The power density and local burnup was transferred from RATTLESNAKE to BISON with the MOOSE Multiapp transfer system. Multiple depletion cases were run with one-way data transfer from RATTLESNAKE to BISON. The eigenvalues are shown to agree well with values obtained from the lattice physics code DRAGON. The one-way data transfer of power density is shown to agree with the power density obtained from an internal Lassman-style model in BISON.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1177214
• Report Number(s): INL/CON-14-31079; TRN: US1500149
• Resource Relation: Conference: PHYSOR 2014, Kyoto (Japan), 28 Sep - 3 Oct 2014
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
NUCLEAR FUELS
MULTIGROUP THEORY
PERFORMANCE
FINITE ELEMENT METHOD
POWER DENSITY
EIGENVALUES
NEUTRON FLUX
BURNUP
COUPLING
RESONANCE
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
TRANSIENTS
REACTOR KINETICS
WATER COOLED REACTORS
WATER MODERATED REACTORS
B CODES
R CODES
BISON
Fuels performance
Multiphysics
Neutron Transport
RattleSnake
Self Adjoint Angular Flux