Creation of an OpenFOAM Fuel Performance Class Based on FRED and Integration Into the GeN-Foam Multi-Physics Code

Abstract

The FRED code is an in-house tool developed at the Paul Scherrer Institut for the so-called 1.5-D nuclear fuel performance analysis. In order to extend its field of application, this code has been re-implemented as a class of the OpenFOAM numerical library. A first objective of this re-implementation is to provide this tool with the parallel scalability necessary for full-core analyses. In addition, the use of OpenFOAM as base library allows for a straightforward interface with the standard Open-FOAM CFD solvers, as well as with the several OpenFOAM-based applications developed by the nuclear engineering community. In this paper, the newly developed FRED-based Open-FOAM class has been integrated in the GeN-Foam multi-physics code mainly developed at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at the Paul Scherrer Institut. The paper presents the details of both the re-implementation of the FRED code and of its integration in GeN-Foam. The performances and parallel scalability of the tool are preliminary investigated and an example of application is provided by performing a full-core multi-physics analysis of the European Sodium Fast Reactor.