An Object-Oriented Systems Engineering Model Design for Integrating Spent Fuel Treatment Facility and Chemical Separation Processes

Abstract

The mission of the Transmutation Research Program (TRP) at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) is to establish a nuclear engineering test bed that can carry out effective transmutation and advanced reactor research and development effort. TRPSEMPro package, developed from previous project period, integrated a chemical separation code from the Argonne National Laboratories (ANL). Current research focus has two folds: development of simulation system processes applied to Spent Fuel Treatment Facility (SFTF) using ASPEN-plus and further interaction of ASPEN+ program from TRPSEMPro interface. More details will be discussed below. ANL has identified three processes simulations using their separation technologies. The first process is to separate aqueous acid streams of acetic acid, nitric acid, water and a variety of fission product nitric salts. Distillation separation method is used to remove the desired components from the streams. The second simulation is to convert plutonium nitrate to plutonium metal. Steps used for the process simulation are precipitation, calcinations, fluorination and reduction. The third process currently under development is vitrification of fission product of raffinate streams. During the process, various waste streams from the plant are mixed and fed to a process that converts them to a solid state glass phase. The vitrification process used by the Hanford and Savannah River facilities was selected as a guideline to develop the prototype simulation process using ASPEN-Plus. Current research is focusing on identifying unit operations required to perform the vitrification of the waste streams. The first two processes are near completion stage. Microsoft Visual Basic (MS VB) has been used to develop the entire system engineering model package, TRPSEMPro. Currently a user friendly interface is under development to facilitate direct execution of ASPEN-plus within TRPSEMPro. The major purpose for the implementation is to create iterative interaction among system engineering modeling, ANL separation model and ASPEN-Plus process that outputs optimized separation/process simulation results. The ASPEN-plus access interface from TRPSEMPro allows users to modify and execute process parameters derived from the ASPEN Plus simulations without navigating through ASPEN-Plus. All ASPEN-plus simulation results can be also accessible by the interface. Such integration provide a single interaction gateway for researchers interested in SFTF process simulation without struggling with complicate data manipulation and joggling among various software packages.