A Simplified Numerical Benchmark for Pool-Type Sodium Fast Reactors

Abstract

The current work presents a simplified benchmark for a pool-type Sodium Fast Reactor based on a 2D (r-z) geometry for testing tightly-coupled spatial neutron transport, thermal-hydraulics and thermal-mechanics modeling. The new benchmark is motivated by development of the multi-physics OpenFOAM-based GeN-Foam code at the Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour at the EPFL, Switzerland, and the FAST code system by the Advanced Nuclear Systems group at the Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland. Aiming at the improvement of modeling and code-to-code comparison, the benchmark could prove useful for developers of tightly-coupled multi-physics simulation tools for reactor analysis. The benchmark specification and the solutions obtained with GeN-Foam are presented and discussed in the paper.