High-resolution coupled physics solvers for analysing fine-scale nuclear reactor design problems.

Area of Science:

• Nuclear Engineering
• Computational Physics
• Multiphysics Simulation

Background:

• Independent development of high-fidelity, validated mono-physics solvers for nuclear reactor analysis.
• Proven scalability of these solvers on petascale computing architectures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an integrated multi-physics simulation capability for current and future nuclear reactor models.
• To tightly couple neutron transport and thermal-hydraulics physics within the SHARP framework.
• To reduce numerical uncertainty and leverage computational resources for reactor analysis.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing a unified component-based architecture for code integration.
• Employing a mesh-data backplane for data exchange between solvers.
• Implementing a flexible coupling-strategy-based driver suite for analysis.
• Presenting the coupling methodology and software interfaces of the SHARP framework.

Main Results:

• Successful integration of independent mono-physics solvers into a coupled multi-physics framework.
• Demonstrated usability of the SHARP framework through verification studies.
• Validation on representative fast sodium-cooled reactor demonstration problems.

Conclusions:

• The SHARP framework provides a viable tool for analysts performing coupled physics analysis.
• The framework enables fully resolved analysis on heterogeneous geometries.
• The approach reduces numerical uncertainty in nuclear reactor design and analysis.