Development of an integrated fission product release and transport code for spatially resolved full-core calculations of V/HTRs

The computer codes FRESCO-I, FRESCO-II, PANAMA and SPATRA developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany in the early 1980s are essential tools to predict the fission product release from spherical fuel elements and the TRISO fuel performance, respectively, under given normal or accidental conditions. These codes are able to calculate a conservative estimation of the source term, i.e. quantity and duration of radionuclide release. Recently, these codes have been reversed engineered, modernized (FORTRAN 95/2003) and combined to form a consistent code named STACY (Source Term Analysis Code System). STACY will later become a module of the V/HTR Code Package (HCP). In addition, further improvements have been implemented to enable more detailed calculations. For example the distinct temperature profile along the pebble radius is now taken into account and coated particle failure rates can be calculated under normal operating conditions. In addition, the absolute fission product release of an V/HTR pebble bed core can be calculated by using the newly developed burnup code Topological Nuclide Transformation (TNT) replacing the former rudimentary approach. As a new functionality, spatially resolved fission product release calculations for normal operating conditions as well as accident conditions can be performed. In case of a full-core calculation, a large number of individual pebbles which follow a random path through the reactor core can be simulated. The history of the individual pebble is recorded, too. Main input data such as spatially resolved neutron fluxes and fluid dynamics data are provided by the VSOP code. Capabilities of the FRESCO-I and SPATRA code which allow for the simulation of the redistribution of fission products within the primary circuit and the deposition of fission products on graphitic and metallic surfaces are also available in STACY. In this paper, details of the STACY model and first results for its application to the 200 MW(th) HTR-Module are presented

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

A Hardware-in-the-Loop Co-simulation of Multi-modal Energy System for Control Validation

In this paper, we present a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) co-simulation framework to test multi-modal energy systems. The framework has been tested using as an example a section of the Living Lab Energy Campus (LLEC) of the Forshungszentrum Jülich (DE). A master algorithm has been developed to orchestrate the two components of the co-simulation platform: the real-time simulation of the power network running on OPAL-RT, and the real-time simulation of the low-temperature district heating (LTDH) network using Functional Mock-up Units (FMU) on a custom cluster. The master algorithm also coordinates the exchange of information between the real-time simulators and the device under test. The device under test is composed of a cloud-based model predictive control (MPC) - that operates on the heat pumps in the LTDH network - and an MQTT broker. The results show the co-simulation is successful and the framework can validate the control algorithm

Status of the development of a fully integrated code system for the simulation of high temperature reactor cores

The HTR code package (HCP) is a new code system, which couples a variety of stand-alone codes for the simulation of different aspects of HTR. HCP will allow the steady-state and transient operating conditions of a 3D reactor core to be simulated including new features such as spatially resolved fission product release calculations or production and transport of graphite dust. For this code the latest programming techniques and standards are applied. As a first step an object-oriented data model was developed which features a high level of readability because it is based on problem-specific data types like Nuclide, Reaction, ReactionHandler, CrossSectionSet, etc. Those classes help to encapsulate and therefore hide specific implementations, which are not relevant with respect to physics. HCP will make use of one consistent data library for which an automatic generation tool was developed. The new data library consists of decay information, cross sections, fission yields, scattering matrices etc. for all available nuclides (e.g. ENDF/B-VII.1). The data can be stored in different formats such as binary, ASCII or XML. The new burn up code TNT (Topological Nuclide Transmutation) applies graph theory to represent nuclide chains and to minimize the calculation effort when solving the burn up equations. New features are the use of energy-dependent fission yields or the calculation of thermal power for decay, fission and capture reactions. With STACY (source term analysis code system) the fission product release for steady state as well as accident scenarios can be simulated for each fuel batch. For a full-core release calculation several thousand fuel elements are tracked while passing through the core. This models the stochastic behavior of a pebble bed in a realistic manner. In this paper we report on the current status of the HCP and present first results, which prove the applicability of the selected approach