Abstract
This work presents the development of a coupling scheme for Serpent2, a continuous-energy Monte Carlo particle transport code, SUBCHANFLOW, a subchannel thermalhydraulics code, and TRANSURANUS, a fuel-performance code, suitable for large-scale high-fidelity depletion calculations for Light Water Reactors. The calculation method is based on the standard neutronic-thermalhydraulic approach, replacing the simple fuel-rod solver in SUBCHANFLOW with the more complex thermomechanic model of TRANSURANUS. The depletion method is fully coupled and semi-implicit, and the implementation relies on an object-oriented design with mesh-based feedback exchange. The results of the three-code system for a 360-day depletion calculation of a VVER-1000 fuel assembly with a pin-by-pin modelling approach are presented and analyzed. The performance of this tool, as well as the bottlenecks for its application to full-core problems, are discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 107213 |
| Journal | Annals of Nuclear Energy |
| Volume | 139 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2020 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Funding
This work was done within the McSAFE project which is receiving funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2014–2018 under grant agreement No 755097. This work was performed on the computational resource ForHLR II funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg and DFG (“Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft”).
Keywords
- LWR
- Multiphysics
- Serpent2
- SUBCHANFLOW
- TRANSURANUS