Coupled neutronics thermal-hydraulics analysis using Monte Carlo and sub-channel codes

Progress toward Monte Carlo–thermal hydraulic coupling using low-order nonlinear diffusion acceleration methods

“…Fuel temperature changes affect microscopic cross sections through Doppler broadening. There are several different methods that have been used to account for varying fuel temperature and are described by Vazquez (Vazquez et al, 2012). These include loading explicit cross sections at a certain temperature interval, performing on-the-fly Doppler broadening and mixing cross sections of different temperatures with a certain weighted average.…”

Static and transient pin-by-pin simulations of a full PWR core with the extended coupled code system DYNSUB

“…Besides sub-channel thermal-hydraulic tools, computational fluid dynamics codes have been coupled to deterministic neutron transport codes to analyze up to a pressurized water reactor (PWR) core with quarter symmetry under steady-state conditions (Kochuas et al, 2012;Weber et al, 2007). Numerous groups work on coupling Monte Carlo (MC) neutron transport methods with thermal-hydraulic tools (Bernnat et al, 2012;Espel et al, 2013;Ivanov et al, 2013Ivanov et al, , 2014Li and Wang, 2012;Vazquez et al, 2012).…”

High-fidelity coupled Monte Carlo neutron transport and thermal-hydraulic simulations using Serpent 2/SUBCHANFLOW

“…Besides sub-channel thermalhydraulic tools, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes have been used together with deterministic neutron transport codes to analyze a pressurized water reactor (PWR) core with quarter symmetry under steady-state conditions (Weber et al, 2007;Kochuas et al, 2012). Many groups couple Monte Carlo (MC) neutron transport methods to thermal-hydraulic tools (Espel et al, 2013;Li and Wang, 2012;Bernnat et al, 2012;Vazquez et al, 2012;Ivanov et al, 2013Ivanov et al, , 2014Gill et al, 2014). Most of these coupling efforts utilize the MC code MCNP.…”