Development and Assessment of CTFFuel

Technical Report · Fri Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/3005421· OSTI ID:3005421

Toptan, Aysenur ^[1]; Salko, Robert ^[2]; Avramova, Maria ^[1]; Kropaczek, Dave ^[2]; Clarno, Kevin ^[2]

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1. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (United States)
2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

This milestone report documents an approach that seeks to develop a standalone fuel solver to simulate steady-state and transient thermo-mechanical responses of light-water reactor fuel rods and assess its temperature predictions against analytical solutions, and a well-known and validated fuel performance code. This manuscript focuses on five major topics: (1) development of the CTFFuel, (2) discussion of the newly implemented fuel deformation models in dynamic gap conductance model of CTFFuel, (3) enabling the dynamic gap conductance model in VERA-CS, (4) verification of the solid conduction solution and comparison of the CTFFuel with respect to the workhorse code, CTF, and (5) benchmark of the thermal conductivity degradation using the burnup dependent fuel thermal conductivity models and benchmark of the fuel centerline temperature using the dynamic gap conductance model with Halden measurements and FRAPCON-4.0 simulation results. CTFFuel temperature predictions are compared to predictions from FRAPCON-4.0 for UO₂, UO₂+Gd₂O₃ and MOX fuels through reactor’s life. The main motivation is to understand discrepancies between CTFFuel and FRAPCON-4.0’s temperature predictions.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 3005421
• Report Number(s): CASL-U--2017-1418-000
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING