Internal multi-scale multi-physics coupled system for high fidelity simulation of light water reactors

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

“…MCNP/SUBCHANFLOW, the coupled Monte Carlo neutron transport and thermal-hydraulic code system developed at KIT (Ivanov et al, , 2014, is to be used in a code-to-code benchmark. In addition, code-to-data benchmarks are progressing for the Venus-1 and Venus-2 critical experiments (NEA, 2013) as well as the MIT BEAVRS benchmark (Horelik et al, 2013).…”

“…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).…”

“…However, besides their long development time these new tools consume significant computational resources and, thus, require large computing clusters to run on. Consequently, while at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) such high-fidelity reactor simulators are developed (Ivanov et al, , 2014, efforts to reduce the inherent limitations of the state-of-the-art tools are undertaken at the same time. The latter evolutionary tools aim at delivering a cost-effective improved simulation of a nuclear power plant (NPP).…”

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.…”

Generación de librerías optimizadas con cuantificación de incertidumbres para cálculos realistas (BEPU) de reactores nucleares de agua ligera

“…Pese a que en los últimos años se ha planteado el acoplamiento de códigos estocásticos con códigos termohidráulicos de subcanal [128,101,62,63,32] la gran limitación está asociada a la cinética ya que a día de hoy no se dispone de ninguna herramienta consolidada para cálculos de Monte Carlo no estacionarios [129]. Adicionalmente está también el efecto de realimentación sobre las secciones eficaces que tienen las variables termohidráulicas, que exije un procesamiento de las primeras en cada actualización de las segundas.…”