Development of coupled PROTEUS-NODAL and SAM code system for multiphysics analysis of molten salt reactors

Abstract

This paper presents the coupled code system of PROTEUS-NODAL and SAM developed for multiphysics simulation of molten salt reactors (MSRs). The coupling was made under the MOOSE framework by developing a MOOSE wrapper of PROTEUS-NODAL and a master application that controls PROTEUS-NODAL neutronics and SAM thermal-fluidic calculations. The coupled code system was verified and validated using the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) benchmark problem and the available experimental data of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiments (MSRE). Steady-state solutions for the MSFR benchmark agreed well with those of manually coupled calculations of PROTEUS-NODAL and ANSYS CFX, and transient solutions agreed well with the open literature results. The validation test results for the pump start-up, pump coast-down, and natural circulation tests of MSRE agreed well with the measured values. These results indicate that the coupled code system of PROTEUS-NODAL and SAM can be used reliably for steady-state and transient analyses of MSRs.