Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Development and validation of multiphysics PWR core simulator KANT

  • Taesuk Oh (Department of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Yunseok Jeong (Department of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Husam Khalefih (Department of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Yonghee Kim (Department of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
  • Received : 2022.08.04
  • Accepted : 2023.02.16
  • Published : 2023.06.25
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Abstract

KANT (KAIST Advanced Nuclear Tachygraphy) is a PWR core simulator recently developed at Korea Advance Institute of Science and Technology, which solves three-dimensional steady-state and transient multigroup neutron diffusion equations under Cartesian geometries alongside the incorporation of thermal-hydraulics feedback effect for multi-physics calculation. It utilizes the standard Nodal Expansion Method (NEM) accelerated with various Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (CMFD) methods for neutronics calculation. For thermal-hydraulics (TH) calculation, a single-phase flow model and a one-dimensional cylindrical fuel rod heat conduction model are employed. The time-dependent neutronics and TH calculations are numerically solved through an implicit Euler scheme, where a detailed coupling strategy is presented in this paper alongside a description of nodal equivalence, macroscopic depletion, and pin power reconstruction. For validation of the steady, transient, and depletion calculation with pin power reconstruction capacity of KANT, solutions for various benchmark problems are presented. The IAEA 3-D PWR and 4-group KOEBERG problems were considered for the steady-state reactor benchmark problem. For transient calculations, LMW (Lagenbuch, Maurer and Werner) LWR and NEACRP 3-D PWR benchmarks were solved, where the latter problem includes thermal-hydraulics feedback. For macroscopic depletion with pin power reconstruction, a small PWR problem modified with KAIST benchmark model was solved. For validation of the multi-physics analysis capability of KANT concerning large-sized PWRs, the BEAVRS Cycle1 benchmark has been considered. It was found that KANT solutions are accurate and consistent compared to other published works.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grants funded by the Korean government NRF-2016R1A5A1013919 and NRF-2021M2D2A2076383.

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