TF VTR SimBench-2018

Forest_Proposals

Major Research Effort

reactor benchmarking

What Simulations need to be done for the VTR?

Part of the VTR mission will be to provide experimental and computational advances in nuclear and materials science by enabling a comprehensive understanding of nuclear fuels as well as structural materials to support the development of advanced nuclear energy systems. ISU has an opportunity to play a role in the development of a VTR program for material irradiation testing. Such a testing program will have a research component that utilizes computational advances to benchmark models of materials that have been exposed to the fast neutrons produced by the VTR. We propose a program to perform model validation using experiments characterize microstructure before and after irradiation.

Specifically nuclear fuel cracking as a result of irradiation will be a focus of the VTR based validation program. Using INL's simulation tool MARMOT, the initial step of this research program will be to develop a validation experiment to measure fuel cracking. The validation experiment will focus on methods to measure local phenomena changes that avoid observing averaged microstructure properties. Most of the available data reports the results of average microstructural properties over long time periods. We propose to development a validation experiment using MARMOT that will characterize microstructure changes in 3D over short time periods.

Education and Training

Reactor Benchmarking

ISU currently has a physics student working as an intern with the MOOSE software development group. The student is focusing on how ions, like fission fragments, loose their energy traversing materials like fuel rods. The students current research involves altering the packages within MARMOT to use different physical descriptions of energy loss that are highly dependent on fragment kinematics. After the internship is completed later this year and with the support of this proposal, the student will move onto using MARMOT to develop a 3-D description of the damage done to a fuel which would result in cracking. Armed with this experience, the student can design experiments that would be used to validate the prediction of MARMOT. The skill sets received in advanced computer and development are in high demand and would easily enable the student to successful enter the technical work force.

Interactions with other institutions

Reactor Benchmarking

Involvement in MOOSE INL group

Activities

Reactor Benchmarking

Describe simulations here

MARMOT will be used to develop validation experiments based on the results of a 3-D description of the damage done to a fuel after irradiation.

Forest_Proposals