Development of CTF Capability for Modeling Reactor Operating Cycles with Crud Growth

Technical Report · Tue Sep 30 00:00:00 EDT 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/3014274· OSTI ID:3014274

Salko, Robert ^[1]; Palmtag, Scott ^[2]; Lange, Travis ^[3]; Gehin, Jess ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
2. Core Physics, Inc., Raleigh, NC (United States)
3. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)

CTF is a thermal-hydraulics simulation tool designed for modeling both fluid and solid regions inside light water reactor vessels. It forms the thermal-hydraulic package of the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications Core Simulator being developed by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light water reactors. The project documented by this report has been undertaken to add a new crud-modeling capability to CTF. Achieving this goal required the completion of three specific tasks: (1) developing a method for running CTF simulations of reactor operating cycles , (2) developing and implementing a basic crud modeling “surrogate”, and (3) developing and implementing a method for inputting detailed core power distributions. These three tasks have been completed and have resulted in a new feature that allows users to run long-time-scale simulations with CTF as a collection of individual, steady-state points that comprise a larger transient. The user is able to drive inlet mass flow rate, inlet temperature, outlet pressure, and core power distributions to new values for each state in the simulation. The crud modeling tool is used at each of these state points to grow crud as a function of current thermal hydraulic conditions of the previously solved state. The developed crud modeling tool makes many simplifications that allow it to make a crude approximation of general crud behavior. It is envisioned that the infrastructure that has resulted from this project will be utilized in the future to facilitate coupling to more advanced crud chemistry codes. This document details work completed during this project and demonstrates the verification of this new capability.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 3014274
• Report Number(s): CASL-U--2014-0188-000
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING