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Coupled fuel performance calculations in VERA and demonstration on Watts Bar unit 1, cycle 1

Journal Article · · Annals of Nuclear Energy (Oxford)
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [1];  [1];  [3];  [4];  [4];  [4];  [4]
  1. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  2. Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States)
  3. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
  4. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

As the core simulator capabilities in the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) have become more mature and stable, increased attention has been focused on coupling Bison to provide fuel performance simulations. This technique has been a very important driver for the pellet-clad interaction challenge problem being addressed by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL). Here, two coupling approaches are demonstrated on quarter core problems based on Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 1, Cycle 1: (1) an inline approach in which a one-way coupling is used between neutronics/thermal hydraulics (through MPACT/CTF) and fuel performance (through Bison) but no fuel temperature information is passed back to MPACT/CTF, and (2) a two-way approach (coupled) in which the fuel temperature is passed from Bison to MPACT/CTF. In both approaches, power and temperature distributions from MPACT/CTF are used to inform the Bison simulations for each rod in the core.The demonstrations presented here are the first integrated fuel performance simulations in VERA, which opens many possibilities for future work, including applications to accident-tolerant fuel efforts and transient simulations, which are of critical importance to CASL. These demonstrations also highlight the potential to move away from the current Bison-informed fuel temperature lookup table approach, which is the default in MPACT/CTF simulations, if performance improvements are made in the near future.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE); USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1658008
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2325413
OSTI ID: 1769928
OSTI ID: 1436047
Journal Information:
Annals of Nuclear Energy (Oxford), Journal Name: Annals of Nuclear Energy (Oxford) Journal Issue: 15 Vol. 145; ISSN 0306-4549
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (8)

Verification of the BISON fuel performance code journal September 2014
Improvement of transport-corrected scattering stability and performance using a Jacobi inscatter algorithm for 2D-MOC journal July 2017
Stability and accuracy of 3D neutron transport simulations using the 2D/1D method in MPACT journal December 2016
The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA): Design and architecture journal December 2016
Multidimensional multiphysics simulation of nuclear fuel behavior journal April 2012
MOOSE: A parallel computational framework for coupled systems of nonlinear equations journal October 2009
Validating the BISON fuel performance code to integral LWR experiments journal May 2016
Pellet-clad mechanical interaction screening using VERA applied to Watts Bar Unit 1, Cycles 1–3 journal February 2018

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Related Subjects

CTF
MPACT
VERA
bison
coupling