TF VTR SimBench-2018
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
Describe students who will work on it and how they will learn computing technologies for the industry
Reactor Benchmarking
Interactions with other institutions
Reactor Benchmarking
Involvement in MOOSE INL group
Activities
Reactor Benchmarking
Describe simulations here