Abstract
High temperature gas cooled reactors (HTGR) are a candidate for timely Gen-IV reactor technology deployment because of high technology readiness and walk-away safety. Among HTGRs, pebble bed reactors (PBRs) have attractive features such as low excess reactivity and online refueling. Pebble bed reactors pose unique challenges to analysts and reactor designers such as continuous burnup distribution depending on pebble motion and recirculation, radiative heat transfer across a variety of gas-filled gaps, and long design basis transients such as pressurized and depressurized loss of forced circulation. Modeling and simulation is essential for both the PBR’s safety case and design process. In order to verify and validate the new generation codes the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Data bank provide a set of benchmarks data together with solutions calculated by the participants using the state of the art codes of that time. An important milestone to test the new PBR simulation codes is the OECD NEA PBMR-400 benchmark which includes thermal hydraulic and neutron kinetic standalone exercises as well as coupled exercises and transients scenarios. In this work, the reactor multiphysics code MAMMOTH and the thermal hydraulics code Pronghorn, both developed by the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) within the multiphysics object-oriented simulation environment (MOOSE), have been used to solve Phase 1 exercises 1 and 2 of the PBMR-400 benchmark. The steady state results are in agreement with the other participants’ solutions demonstrating the adequacy of MAMMOTH and Pronghorn for simulating PBRs.
Highlights
Software quality assurance requires new codes to undergo rigorous benchmarking to demonstrate their capabilities in simulating problems of interest for the design and assessment of pebble bed reactors (PBRs)
MAMMOTH has been validated against the HTR-10 benchmark [8]; while Pronghorn has been validated against the SANA benchmark [3]
MAMMOTH and Pronghorn are used for solving the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR)-400 steady-state benchmark exercises [9]
Summary
Software quality assurance requires new codes to undergo rigorous benchmarking to demonstrate their capabilities in simulating problems of interest for the design and assessment of pebble bed reactors (PBRs). Verification and Validation (V&V) for PBRs is currently ongoing for the MAMMOTH [1] reactor multiphysics code and the Pronghorn [2,3,4] thermal-hydraulics code, that are. MAMMOTH is built on the Rattlesnake radiation multiphysics code [6,7]. MAMMOTH and Pronghorn are used for solving the PBMR-400 steady-state benchmark exercises [9]. As PBMR-400 is a numerical benchmark, success is measured by comparing the obtained results with results submitted by the other benchmark participants.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
