Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Towards grain-scale modelling of the release of radioactive fission gas from oxide fuel. Part II: Coupling SCIANTIX with TRANSURANUS

  • G. Zullo (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Energy, Nuclear Engineering Division) ;
  • D. Pizzocri (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Energy, Nuclear Engineering Division) ;
  • A. Magni (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Energy, Nuclear Engineering Division) ;
  • P. Van Uffelen (European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)) ;
  • A. Schubert (European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)) ;
  • L. Luzzi (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Energy, Nuclear Engineering Division)
  • Received : 2022.02.24
  • Accepted : 2022.07.24
  • Published : 2022.12.25
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Abstract

The behaviour of the fission gas plays an important role in the fuel rod performance. In a previous work, we presented a physics-based model describing intra- and inter-granular behaviour of radioactive fission gas. The model was implemented in SCIANTIX, a mesoscale module for fission gas behaviour, and assessed against the CONTACT 1 irradiation experiment. In this work, we present the multi-scale coupling between the TRANSURANUS fuel performance code and SCIANTIX, used as mechanistic module for stable and radioactive fission gas behaviour. We exploit the coupled code version to reproduce two integral irradiation experiments involving standard fuel rod segments in steady-state operation (CONTACT 1) and during successive power transients (HATAC C2). The simulation results demonstrate the predictive capabilities of the code coupling and contribute to the integral validation of the models implemented in SCIANTIX.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Christopher Gosdin (FPoliSolutions, LLC) for his valuable contribution to the preparation of the HATAC C2 input file for the TRANSURANUS code. The authors also thank Ville Peri from FORTUM (Finland), who implemented the original version of the ANS-5.4 model in the TRANSURANUS code. This project has received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No 847656.

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