Abstract
This paper summarizes recent development efforts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to improve the CTFFuel subpackage within CTF. This improvement will enable accurate and quick thermal feedback to the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) core simulator for core follow applications. CTF serves as the thermal-hydraulics code for the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactor (CASL) VERA core simulator. CTFFuel is a subpackage that solves the heat transfer behavior in fuel and cladding. This paper discusses the current status of CTFFuel, summarizes its modeling features, and discusses additions and improvements of several burnup-dependent models to simulate fuel and cladding deformations resulting from irradiation and thermal exposure. The temperature results calculated by CTFFuel were benchmarked against those calculated by BISON. This paper also discusses the new depletion and the restart capability recently added to CTFFuel. The improved CTFFuel was also tested in a coupled full-core simulation, with CTFFuel providing pin-level thermal feedback in real time to the neutronic code in VERA. Good agreement has been observed when comparing those simulation results against either plant data or calculated results using the temperature tables pregenerated by BISON.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages | 312-321 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| State | Published - 2020 |
| Event | 14th International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference, GLOBAL 2019 and Light Water Reactor Fuel Performance Conference, TOP FUEL 2019 - Seattle, United States Duration: Sep 22 2019 → Sep 27 2019 |
Conference
| Conference | 14th International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference, GLOBAL 2019 and Light Water Reactor Fuel Performance Conference, TOP FUEL 2019 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Seattle |
| Period | 09/22/19 → 09/27/19 |
Funding
1Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| US Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy |