Assessment of BISON fuel performance code and its application to advanced fuels

摘要

DOE's Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs (CASL) energy hub aims at developing a framework to simulate a PWR core multi-physics in 3-D. The BISON fuel performance code is a tool developed by Idaho National Lab that is built in the same finite element framework as CASL's tool for fuel performance, without proprietary industry models. In this study, the BISON code performance, in terms of computational time and prediction of important fuel rod parameters is compared in detail to the NRC's licensed fuel performance code FRAPCON3.4. The overall results showed a good agreement with FRAPCON, inferring the usability of the code for PWR analysis. Though The computational time for BISON was over 3 orders of magnitude higher than FRAPCON, even with smearing the fuel and modeling the problem in a 2D axisymmetric geometry. The SiC cladding is proposed for future LWRs to reduce corrosion and eliminate copious hydrogen production at high temperatures, known problems of Zircaloy. An innovative hybrid fuel rod with both solid and annular pellets can be optimized, using BISON, to reduce the fuel rod internal pressure and temperature for the SiC design. The BISON code proved advantages to readily enable modelling this problem as the FRAPCON 3.4 code is hardwired to model either only solid or only annular pellets.