High-Fidelity Multiphysics Modeling of a Heat Pipe Microreactor Using BlueCrab

Journal Article · Mon Aug 05 00:00:00 EDT 2024 · Nuclear Science and Engineering

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2375175· OSTI ID:2569789

Stauff, Nicolas E. ^[1]; Miao, Yinbin ^[1]; Cao, Yan ^[1]; Mo, Kun ^[1]; Abdelhameed, Ahmed Amin E. ^[1]; Ibarra, Lander ^[1]; Matthews, Christopher ^[2]; Shemon, Emily R. ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
2. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Researchers who are actively developing nuclear microreactors are planning to employ innovative designs and features using traditional commercial modeling tools that may be inadequate for their design and licensing activities. The codes developed under the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program provide flexibility in terms of geometry modeling and multiphysics coupling and are particularly well suited for modeling novel microreactor concepts. To test the maturity of these codes, this paper introduces a conceptual heat pipe microreactor (HP-MR) designed to gather various technologies of interest to microreactor developers such as control drums, heat pipes, and hydride moderators. Here, the objective of this effort is to demonstrate NEAMS tools capability to perform high-fidelity multiphysics simulations, using coupled neutronics (via the Griffin code), heat conduction (via the BISON code), heat pipe modeling (via the Sockeye code), and hydrogen redistribution in hydride metal moderator (via the SWIFT code). Codes are coupled in-memory through the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework, which permits flexible multiphysics data transfer schemes. The analysis confirmed two key aspects of the HP-MR concept: (1) its ability to follow the power load requested from the heat pipe and (2) its ability to avoid heat pipe cascading failure unless designed with high power close to operating failure limits of its heat pipes. The developed computational model was distributed publicly on the Virtual Test Bed for training purposes to accelerate adoption by industry and to provide a high-fidelity multiphysics solution for benchmarking against other tools. Additional multiphysics analyses including other transients and coupled physics were identified as necessary future work, together with a focus on validating multiphysics behavior against experiments.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357; AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 2569789
• Journal Information: Nuclear Science and Engineering, Journal Name: Nuclear Science and Engineering; ISSN 0029-5639; ISSN 1943-748X
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Microreactor
heat pipe
multiphysics