COMPUTATIONAL FOUNDATIONS FOR REACTOR FUEL PERFORMANCE MODELING

摘要

The simulation of nuclear reactor fuel performance involves complex thermo-mechanical processes between fuel pellets, made of fissile material, and the protective cladding barrier that surrounds the pellets. This paper examines various mathematical and computational issues that impact the thermo-mechanical response of reactor fuel, and are thus important to the development of INL's fuel performance analysis code, BISON. The code employs advanced methods for solving coupled partial differential equation systems that describe multidimensional fuel thermomechanics, heat generation and transport within the fuel, chemical constituent and fuel structural degradation. BISON is designed for fully coupled, steady and transient analysis, and to be efficient on both desktop computers and in massively parallel environments. It employs physics-based preconditioned Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov solution methods and is developed using modern software engineering principles to form a robust, extensible software architecture to provide a predictive capability for fuel performance analysis.