A New Capability for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Design
- Nuclear Systems Design Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545 (United States)
- NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35812 (United States)
This paper describes a new capability for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) design that has been developed, and presents the results of some analyses performed with this design tool. The purpose of the tool is to design to specified mission and material limits, while maximizing system thrust to weight. The head end of the design tool utilizes the ROCket Engine Transient Simulation (ROCETS) code to generate a system design and system design requirements as inputs to the core analysis. ROCETS is a modular system level code which has been used extensively in the liquid rocket engine industry for many years. The core design tool performs high-fidelity reactor core nuclear and thermal-hydraulic design analysis. At the heart of this process are two codes TMSS-NTP and NTPgen, which together greatly automate the analysis, providing the capability to rapidly produce designs that meet all specified requirements while minimizing mass. A PERL based command script, called CORE DESIGNER controls the execution of these two codes, and checks for convergence throughout the process. TMSS-NTP is executed first, to produce a suite of core designs that meet the specified reactor core mechanical, thermal-hydraulic and structural requirements. The suite of designs consists of a set of core layouts and, for each core layout specific designs that span a range of core fuel volumes. NTPgen generates MCNPX models for each of the core designs from TMSS-NTP. Iterative analyses are performed in NTPgen until a reactor design (fuel volume) is identified for each core layout that meets cold and hot operation reactivity requirements and that is zoned to meet a radial core power distribution requirement.
- OSTI ID:
- 21054549
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 880, Issue 1; Conference: International forum-STAIF 2007: 11. conference on thermophysics applications in microgravity; 24. symposium on space nuclear power and propulsion; 5. conference on human/robotic technology and the vision for space exploration; 5. symposium on space colonization; 4. symposium on new frontiers and future concepts, Albuquerque, NM (United States), 11-15 Feb 2007; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.2437484; (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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