Pronghorn Theory Manual

Recent SAM Code Improvement to Heat Transfer Modeling Capabilities

“…In nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics analysis, it is a common approach to using porous medium flow to model the fluid flow and heat transfer in very complex but with regular pattern geometries, such as the pebble bed core in high temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) and tube bundles in steam generators. As such examples, THERMIX [3] and recently developed Pronghorn [4] are both based on porous-medium approach and are used to predict core thermal-hydraulics behaviors in pebble-bed type of reactors. The COMMIX code [5] [6] was based on multiphase porous medium approach, which had been successfully applied in many thermal-hydraulics analysis applications, such as reactor rod bundles and heat exchangers.…”

Initial use of Nek5000/Cardinal to improve closure models in Pronghorn

“…This is an existing demand in the development of Cardinal [1], a new platform for lower-length-scale simulation of pebble-bed cores. In the context of the present work, we employ the lower scale simulator NekRS to derive heat transfer formulations that might be supplied to engineering scale codes such as Pronghorn [2] and Mammoth [3].…”

Survey and Assessment of Computational Capabilities for Advanced (Non-LWR) Reactor Mechanistic Source Term Analysis.

“…Pronghorn is an engineering-level system analysis tool for advanced reactor thermal hydraulics, especially made for systems with flow through porous media such as pebble bed reactors like HTGR and FHR [34]. Using finite-element porous media models, Pronghorn does not provide the same level of flow detail around pebbles as CFD, but generally predicts fluid flow and fluidsolid heat transfer fairly well [35].…”

“…Pronghorn is a finite element (FE), porous media thermal-hydraulics simulation code built on the MOOSE framework made for pebble bed reactors [34]. As mentioned previously, porous media models cannot capture flow details around the pebbles or the highly asymmetric drag and heat transfer in the bed, therefore Pronghorn is best utilized for design scoping studies or core boundary condition elucidation at a fraction of the computational cost of higher fidelity codes.…”