• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2007

The conceptual design of the MIT modular pebble bed reactor is described. This reactor plant is a 250 Mwth, 120 Mwe indirect cycle plant that is designed to be deployed in the near term using demonstrated helium system components. The primary system is a conventional pebble bed reactor with a dynamic central column with an outlet temperature of 900 C providing helium to an intermediate helium to helium heat exchanger (IHX). The outlet of the IHX is input to a three shaft horizontal Brayton Cycle power conversion system. The design constraint used in sizing the plant is based on a factory modularity principle which allows the plant to be assembled 'Lego' style instead of constructed piece by piece. This principle employs space frames which contain the power conversion system that permits the Lego-like modules to be shipped by truck or train to sites. This paper also describes the research that has been conducted at MIT since 1998 on fuel modeling, silver leakage from coated fuel particles, dynamic simulation, MCNP reactor physics modeling and air ingress analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.803-810
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• 2022

The small modular liquid-metal fast reactor (SMFR) is an important component of advanced nuclear systems. SMFRs exhibit relatively low breeding capability and constraint space for control rod installation. Consequently, control rods are deeply inserted at beginning and are withdrawn gradually to compensate for large burnup reactivity loss in a long lifetime. This paper is committed to investigating the impact of control rod compensation operation on core neutronics characteristics. This paper presents a whole core fine depletion model of long lifetime SMFR using OpenMC and the influence of depletion chains is verified. Three control rod position schemes to simulate the compensation process are compared. The results show that the fine simulation of the control rod compensation process impacts significantly the fuel burnup distribution and absorber consumption. A control rod equivalent position scheme proposed in this work is an optimal option in the trade-off between computation time and accuracy. The control position is crucial for accurate power distribution and void feedback coefficients in SMFRs. The results in this paper also show that the pin level power distribution is important due to the heterogeneous distribution in SMFRs. The fuel burnup distribution at the end of core life impacts the worth of control rods.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2184-2194
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• 2021

The Free-Piston Stirling engine (FPSE) is of interest for many research in aerospace due to its advantages of long operating life, higher efficiency, and zero maintenance. In this study, a 1-kW FPSE was proposed by analyzing the requirements of Space Reactor Power Systems (SRPS), of which performance was evaluated by developing a code through the Simple Analysis Method. The results of SAM showed that the critical parameters of FPSE could satisfy the designed requirements. The heater of the FPSE was designed with the copper rectangular fins to enhance heat transfer, and the parametric study of the heater was performed with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software STAR-CCM⁺. The Performance Evaluation Criteria (PEC) was used to evaluate the heat transfer enhancement of the fins in the heater. The numerical results of the CFD program showed that pressure drop and Nusselt number ratio had a linear growth with the height of fins, and PEC number decreased as the height of fins increased, and the optimum height of the fin was set as 4 mm according to the minimum heat exchange surface area. This paper can provide theoretical supports for the design and numerical analysis of an FPSE for SRPSs.

• 전기의세계
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.58-62
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• 1978

The problem of optimal shutdown control of nuclear reactor having nonlinear dynamics is considered. Since the problem, being a bounded state space problem, is difficult to solve by conventional analytic methods such as Pontryagin's maximum principle, it is approached directly by the quasilinearization technique, and solved numerically. The solution obtained in this manner proves to be an improvement over the previous results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.9
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• pp.3213-3228
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• 2023

As an important part of the digital reactor, the pin-by-pin wise fine coupling calculation is a research hotspot in the field of nuclear engineering in recent years. It provides more precise and realistic simulation results for reactor design, operation and safety evaluation. CORCA-K a nodal code is redeveloped as a robust pin-by-pin wise neutronics and thermal-hydraulic coupled calculation code for pressurized water reactor (PWR) core. The nodal green's function method (NGFM) is used to solve the three-dimensional space-time neutron dynamics equation, and the single-phase single channel model and one-dimensional heat conduction model are used to solve the fluid field and fuel temperature field. The mesh scale of reactor core simulation is raised from the nodal-wise to the pin-wise. It is verified by two benchmarks: NEACRP 3D PWR and PWR MOX/UO₂. The results show that: 1) the pin-by-pin wise coupling calculation system has good accuracy and can accurately simulate the key parameters in steady-state and transient coupling conditions, which is in good agreement with the reference results; 2) Compared with the nodal-wise coupling calculation, the pin-by-pin wise coupling calculation improves the fuel peak temperature, the range of power distribution is expanded, and the lower limit is reduced more.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.888-895
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• 2022

Lately, ocean nuclear power plants have attracted attention as one of diverse uses of nuclear power plants. Because ocean nuclear power plants are movable or transportable, it is necessary to analyze the thermal hydraulics in a moving frame of reference, and computer codes have been developed to predict thermal hydraulics in large moving systems. The purpose of this study is to incorporate a three dimensional dynamic motion model into the SPACE code (Safety and Performance Analysis CodE) so that the code is able to analyze thermal hydraulics in an ocean nuclear power plant. A rotation system that describes three-dimensional rotations about an arbitrary axis was implemented, and modifications were made to the one-dimensional momentum equations to reflect the rectilinear and rotational acceleration effects. To demonstrate the code's ability to solve a problem utilizing a rotational frame of reference, code calculations were conducted on various conceptual problems in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional pipeline loops. In particular, the code results for the three-dimensional pipeline loop with a tilted rotation axis agreed well with the multi-dimensional CFD results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.207-224
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• 2012

This article discusses selects of some outstanding problems in nuclear reactor analysis, with proposed approaches thereto and numerical test results, as follows: i) multi-group approximation in the transport equation, ii) homogenization based on isolated single-assembly calculation, and iii) critical spectrum in Monte Carlo depletion.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.1514-1524
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• 2019

Hydrogen-steam gas mixture may be injected into containment with flow regime varying both spatially and transiently due to wall effect and pressure difference between primary loop and containment in severe accidents induced by loss of coolant accident. Preliminary CFD analysis is conducted to gain information about the helium flow regime transition process from jet to buoyancy plume for forthcoming experimental study. Physical models of impinging jet and wall condensation are validated using separated effect experimental data, firstly. Then helium transportation is analyzed with the effect of jet momentum, buoyancy and wall cooling discussed. Result shows that helium distribution is totally dominated by impinging jet in the beginning, high concentration appears near gas source and wall where jet momentum is strong. With the jet weakening, stable light gas layer without recirculating eddy is established by buoyancy. Transient reversed helium distribution appears due to natural convection resulted from wall cooling, which delays the stratification. It is necessary to concern about hydrogen accumulation in lower space under the containment external cooling strategy. From the perspective of experiment design, measurement point should be set at the height of connecting pipe and near the wall for stratification stability criterion and impinging jet modelling validation.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.226-233
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• 2022

In the present work, a phase-field model was developed to investigate the influence of recrystallization on bubble evolution during irradiation. Considering the interaction between bubbles and grain boundary (GB), a set of modified Cahn-Hilliard and Allen-Cahn equations, with field variables and order parameters evolving in space and time, was used in this model. Both the kinetics of recrystallization characterized in experiments and point defects generated during cascade were incorporated in the model. The bubble evolution in recrystallized polycrystalline of U-Mo alloy was also investigated. The simulation results showed that GB with a large area fraction generated by recrystallization accelerates the formation and growth of bubbles. With the formation of new grains, gas atoms are swept and collected by GBs. The simulation results of bubble size and distribution are consistent with the experimental results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.243-256
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• 2011

This paper considers the concept of analog computing based on a cellular neural network (CNN) paradigm to simulate nuclear reactor dynamics using a time-dependent second order form of the neutron transport equation. Instead of solving nuclear reactor dynamic equations numerically, which is time-consuming and suffers from such weaknesses as vulnerability to transient phenomena, accumulation of round-off errors and floating-point overflows, use is made of a new method based on a cellular neural network. The state-of-the-art shows the CNN as being an alternative solution to the conventional numerical computation method. Indeed CNN is an analog computing paradigm that performs ultra-fast calculations and provides accurate results. In this study use is made of the CNN model to simulate the space-time response of scalar flux distribution in steady state and transient conditions. The CNN model also is used to simulate step perturbation in the core. The accuracy and capability of the CNN model are examined in 2D Cartesian geometry for two fixed source problems, a mini-BWR assembly, and a TWIGL Seed/Blanket problem. We also use the CNN model concurrently for a typical small PWR assembly to simulate the effect of temperature feedback, poisons, and control rods on the scalar flux distribution.