Neutron transport with the method of characteristics for 3-D full core boiling water reactor applications
Abstract
The Numerical Nuclear Reactor (NNR) is a code suite that is being developed to provide high-fidelity multi-physics capability for the analysis of light water nuclear reactors. The focus of the work here is to extend the capability of the NNR by incorporation of the neutronics module, DeCART, for Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) applications. The DeCART code has been coupled to the NNR fluid mechanics and heat transfer module STAR-CD for light water reactor applications. The coupling has been accomplished via an interface program, which is responsible for mapping the STAR-CD and DeCART meshes, managing communication, and monitoring convergence. DeCART obtains the solution of the 3-D Boltzmann transport equation by performing a series of 2-D modular ray tracing-based method of characteristics problems that are coupled within the framework of 3-D coarse-mesh finite difference. The relatively complex geometry and increased axial heterogeneity found in BWRs are beyond the modeling capability of the original version of DeCART. In this work, DeCART is extended in three primary areas. First, the geometric capability is generalized by extending the modular ray tracing scheme and permitting an unstructured mesh in the global finite difference kernel. Second, numerical instabilities, which arose as a result of the severe axial heterogeneity found in BWR cores, have been resolved. Third, an advanced nodal method has been implemented to improve the accuracy of the axial flux distribution. In this semi-analytic nodal method, the analytic solution to the transverse-integrated neutron diffusion equation is obtained, where the nonhomogeneous neutron source was first approximated by a quartic polynomial. The successful completion of these three tasks has allowed the application of the coupled DeCART/STAR-CD code to practical BWR problems.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Downar, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Nuclear physics
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