Status report on high fidelity reactor simulation.

Palmiotti, G. ; Smith, M. ; Rabiti, C. ; Lewis, E. ; Yang, W. ; Leclere,M. ; Siegel, A. ; Fischer, P. ; Kaushik, D. ; Ragusa, J. ; Lottes, J. ; Smith, B.

Argonne National Laboratory

关键词: Fluid Mechanics;    Testing;    Burners;    Heat Transfer;    Computers;   

DOI  :  10.2172/898580
RP-ID  :  ANL-AFCI-175
RP-ID  :  DE-AC02-06CH11357
RP-ID  :  898580

美国|其它

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

This report presents the effort under way at Argonne National Laboratory toward a comprehensive, integrated computational tool intended mainly for the high-fidelity simulation of sodium-cooled fast reactors. The main activities carried out involved neutronics, thermal hydraulics, coupling strategies, software architecture, and high-performance computing. A new neutronics code, UNIC, is being developed. The first phase involves the application of a spherical harmonics method to a general, unstructured three-dimensional mesh. The method also has been interfaced with a method of characteristics. The spherical harmonics equations were implemented in a stand-alone code that was then used to solve several benchmark problems. For thermal hydraulics, a computational fluid dynamics code called Nek5000, developed in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division for coupled hydrodynamics and heat transfer, has been applied to a single-pin, periodic cell in the wire-wrap geometry typical of advanced burner reactors. Numerical strategies for multiphysics coupling have been considered and higher-accuracy efficient methods proposed to finely simulate coupled neutronic/thermal-hydraulic reactor transients. Initial steps have been taken in order to couple UNIC and Nek5000, and simplified problems have been defined and solved for testing. Furthermore, we have begun developing a lightweight computational framework, based in part on carefully selected open source tools, to nonobtrusively and efficiently integrate the individual physics modules into a unified simulation tool.