A Serpent2-SUBCHANFLOW-TRANSURANUS coupling for pin-by-pin depletion calculations in Light Water Reactors

Manuel García*, Riku Tuominen, Andre Gommlich, Diego Ferraro, Ville Valtavirta, Uwe Imke, Paul Van Uffelen, Luigi Mercatali, Victor Sanchez-Espinoza, Jaakko Leppänen, Sören Kliem

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)

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 languageEnglish
Article number107213
JournalAnnals of Nuclear Energy
Volume139
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2020
MoE publication typeA1 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

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