Transient analysis in the 3D nodal kinetics and thermal-hydraulics ANDES/COBRA coupled system

Abstract

Neutron kinetics has been implemented in the 3D nodal solver ANDES, which has been coupled to the core thermal-hydraulics (TH) code COBRA-III for core transient analysis. The purpose of this work is, first, to discuss and test the ability of the kinetics solver ANDES to model transients; and second, by means of a systematic analysis, including alternate kinetics schemes, time step size, nodal size, neutron energy groups and spectrum, to serve as a basis for the development of more accurate and efficient neutronics/thermal-hydraulics tools for general transient simulations. The PWR MOX/UO2 transient benchmark provided by the OECD/NEA and US NRC was selected for these goals. The obtained ANDES/COBRA-III results were consistent with other solutions to the benchmark; the differences in the TH feedback led to slight differences in the core power evolution, whereas very good agreements were found in the other requested parameters. The performed systematic analysis highlighted the optimum kinetics iterative scheme, and showed that neutronics spatial discretization effects have stronger influence than time discretization effects, in the semi-implicit scheme adopted, on the numerical solution. On the other hand, the number of energy groups has an important influence on the transient evolution, whereas the assumption of using the prompt neutron spectrum for delayed neutrons is acceptable as it leads to small relative errors