Development of a general coupling interface for the fuel performance code TRANSURANUS tested with the reactor dynamic code DYN3D

Several institutions plan to couple the fuel performance code TRANSURANUS developed by the European Institute for Transuranium Elements with their own codes. One of these codes is the reactor dynamic code DYN3D maintained by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf. DYN3D was developed originally for VVER type reactors and was extended later to western type reactors. Usually, the fuel rod behavior is modeled in thermal hydraulics and neutronic codes in a simplified manner. The main idea of this coupling is to describe the fuel rod behavior in the frame of core safety analysis in a more detailed way, e.g. including the influence of the high burn-up structure, geometry changes and fission gas release. It allows to take benefit from the improved computational power and software achieved over the last two decades. The coupling interface was developed in a general way from the beginning. Thence it can be easily used also by other codes for a coupling with TRANSURANUS. The user can choose between a one-way as well as a two-way online coupling option. For a one-way online coupling, DYN3D provides only the time-dependent rod power and thermal hydraulics conditions to TRANSURANUS, but the fuel performance code doesn’t transfer any variable back to DYN3D. In a two-way online coupling, TRANSURANUS in addition transfers parameters like fuel temperature and cladding temperature back to DYN3D. This list of variables can be extended easily by geometric and further variables of interest. First results of the code system DYN3D-TRANSURANUS will be presented for a control rod ejection transient in a modern western type reactor. Pre-analyses show already that a detailed fuel rod behavior modeling can strongly affect the thermal hydraulics and thence also the neutronics due to the Doppler reactivity effect of the fuel temperature. The coupled code system has therefore a potential to improve the assessment of safety criteria. The developed code system DYN3D-TRANSURANUS can be used also for VVER type reactors. For this purpose, only the DYN3D and TRANSURANUS input files have to be modified.

HOLT Lars;  ROHDE Ulrich;  SEIDL Markus;  SCHUBERT Arndt;  VAN UFFELEN Paul; 

2015-01-22

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

JRC84017

1313-4531,   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC84017,