Abstract
An integrated multi-physics simulation capability for the design and analysis of current and future nuclear reactor models is being investigated, to tightly couple neutron transport and thermal-hydraulics physics under the SHARP framework. Over several years, high-fidelity, validated mono-physics solvers with proven scalability on petascale architectures have been developed independently. Based on a unified component-based architecture, these existing codes can be coupled with a mesh-data backplane and a flexible coupling-strategy-based driver suite to produce a viable tool for analysts. The goal of the SHARP framework is to perform fully resolved coupled physics analysis of a reactor on heterogeneous geometry, in order to reduce the overall numerical uncertainty while leveraging available computational resources. The coupling methodology and software interfaces of the framework are presented, along with verification studies on two representative fast sodium-cooled reactor demonstration problems to prove the usability of the SHARP framework.
Highlights
High-fidelity computer simulations of multi-physics problems require solving large systems of complex, coupled, nonlinear, stiff equations
We investigate the bottom-up approach for performing coupled multi-physics analysis of reactor core systems using the SHARP framework with a flexible options-based implementation to test both loosely coupled and fully converged (Picard) coupling strategies
We begin by describing the components that make up the SHARP coupled multi-physics code framework, and we describe necessary modifications to integrate existing physics components into this framework
Summary
High-fidelity computer simulations of multi-physics problems require solving large systems of complex, coupled, nonlinear, stiff equations. Nuclear reactor analysis is a good example of a highly nonlinear, coupled, stiff problem, and the nonlinearities at the heart of reactor design, analysis and safety calculations provide a good state-space to test robust, high-fidelity numerical methods for multi-physics problems Physical phenomena such as those found in reactor accidents involve rapidly varying transients yielding stiff systems of differential equations that are characterized by solutions having fast varying modes together with slower varying modes, requiring time integrators that can handle such disparate time scales. Picard iterations can restore the convergence order of a higher order scheme and eliminate the loss of accuracy due to the crude explicit linearization in a loosely coupled strategy The schematic for such a method is shown in figure 2.
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