Progress on the development of a new fuel management code to simulate the movement of pebble and block type fuel elements in a very high temperature reactor core

The history of gas-cooled high-temperature reactor prototypes in Germany is closely related to Forschungszentrum Jülich and its “Institute of Nuclear Waste Disposal and Reactor Safety (IEK-6)”. A variety of computer codes have been developed, validated and optimized to simulate the different safety and operational aspects of V/HTR. In order to overcome the present limitations of these codes and to exploit the advantages of modern computer clusters, a project has been initiated to integrate these individual programs into a consistent V/HTR code package (VHCP) applying state-of-the-art programming techniques and standards. One important aspect in the simulation of a V/HTR is the modeling of a continuous moving pebble bed or the periodic rearrangement of prismatic block type fuel. Present models are either too coarse to take special issues (e.g. pebble piles) into account or are too detailed and therefore too time consuming to be applicable in the HCP. The new Software for Handling Universal Fuel Elements (SHUFLE) recently being developed is well suited to close this gap. Although at first the code has been designed for pebble bed reactors, it can in principal be applied to all other types of nuclear fuel. The granularity of the mesh grid meets the requirements to consider these special issues while keeping the used computing power within reasonable limits. New features are for example the possibility to consider azimuthally differing flow velocities in the case of a pebble bed reactor or individual void factors to simulate effects to seismic events. The general idea behind this new approach to the simulation of pebble bed reactors is the following: In the preprocessing step, experimental flow lines or flow lines simulated by more detailed codes serve as an input. For each radial mesh column a representative flow line is then determined by interpolation. These representative flow lines are finally mapped to a user defined rectangular grid forming chains of meshes. Due to the tapering in the cone region, neighboring chains collide and merge. During the simulation, the pebble flow is depicted by a number of seepage processes. At a merging point, several options exist to handle the batches involved: instant mixing with or without homogenization as well as delayed mixing. The software has been validated against ANABEK experiment