Issue |
EPJ Web Conf.
Volume 247, 2021
PHYSOR2020 – International Conference on Physics of Reactors: Transition to a Scalable Nuclear Future
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 04005 | |
Number of page(s) | 8 | |
Section | Monte Carlo Transport | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124704005 | |
Published online | 22 February 2021 |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124704005
SERPENT/SUBCHANFLOW COUPLED BURNUP CALCULATIONS FOR VVER FUEL ASSEMBLIES
1 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
2 VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd., P.O. Box 1000, FI-02044 VTT, Finland
Published online: 22 February 2021
The continuous improvement in nuclear industry safety standards and reactor designers’ and operators’ commercial goals represent a push for the development of highly accurate methodologies in reactor physics. This fact, combined with the availability of vast computational resources, allowed the development of a wide range of coupled state-of-the-art neutronic-thermal-hydraulic calculation tools worldwide during last decade. Under this framework, the McSAFE European Union project is a coordinated effort aimed to develop multiphysics tools based on Monte Carlo neutron transport and subchannel thermal-hydraulics codes, suitable for high-fidelity calculations for PWR and VVER reactors. This work presents the results for a pin-by-pin coupled burnup calculation using the Serpent 2 code (developed by VTT, Finland) and the subchannel thermal-hydraulics code SUBCHANFLOW (SCF, developed by KIT, Germany) for two different VVER-type fuel assembly types. For such purpose, a recently refurbished master-slave coupling scheme is considered, which provides several new features such as burnup and transient calculations capabilities for square and hexagonal geometries. Main aspects of this coupling are presented for this burnup case, showing some of the capabilities now available. On top of that, the obtained global results are compared with available published data from a similar high-fidelity approach for the same FA design, showing a good agreement. Finally, a brief analysis of the main resources requirement and main bottlenecks identification are also included. The results presented here provide valuable insights and pave the way to tackle the final goals of the McSAFE project, which includes full-core pin-by-pin depletion calculation within a fully coupled MC-TH approach.
Key words: VVER / Serpent / SCF / codes coupling / burnup / high-fidelity
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.