High-Fidelity Multiphysics Modeling of a Heat Pipe Microreactor Using BlueCrab

Abstract

Researchers who are actively developing nuclear microreactors are planning to employ innovative designs and features using traditional commercial modeling tools that may be inadequate for their design and licensing activities. The codes developed under the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program provide flexibility in terms of geometry modeling and multiphysics coupling and are particularly well suited for modeling novel microreactor concepts. To test the maturity of these codes, this paper introduces a conceptual heat pipe microreactor (HP-MR) designed to gather various technologies of interest to microreactor developers such as control drums, heat pipes, and hydride moderators. The objective of this effort is to demonstrate NEAMS tools capability to perform high-fidelity multiphysics simulations, using coupled neutronics (via the Griffin code), heat conduction (via the BISON code), heat pipe modeling (via the Sockeye code), and hydrogen redistribution in hydride metal moderator (via the SWIFT code). Codes are coupled in-memory through the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework, which permits flexible multiphysics data transfer schemes. The analysis confirmed two key aspects of the HP-MR concept: (1) its ability to follow the power load requested from the heat pipe and (2) its ability to avoid heat pipe cascading failure unless designed with high power close to operating failure limits of its heat pipes. The developed computational model was distributed publicly on the Virtual Test Bed for training purposes to accelerate adoption by industry and to provide a high-fidelity multiphysics solution for benchmarking against other tools. Additional multiphysics analyses including other transients and coupled physics were identified as necessary future work, together with a focus on validating multiphysics behavior against experiments.

Keywords:

• Microreactor
• multiphysics
• heat pipe

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express appreciation to Cody Permann for his support throughout this project. Invaluable support was provided by the Sockeye developers, Griffin developers, Reactor Module and MeshGenerator system developers, and MOOSE framework developers. Previous contributions to Sockeye model development from Justin Thomas are very appreciated. The VTB reviews from Guillaume Giudicelli were instrumental in providing directions for improvements of submitted models.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The submitted manuscript has been created by UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of ANL. ANL, a DOE Office of Science laboratory, is operated under contract number DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work was developed under the NEAMS Application Drivers Micro-Reactor work package supported by the DOE-NE NEAMS program under the Multiphysics Applications Technical Area. This research made use of INL computing resources, which are supported by the DOE-NE and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under contract number DE-AC07-05ID14517.