The Numerical Nuclear Reactor for High Fidelity Integrated Simulation of Neutronic, Thermal-Hydraulic and Thermo Mechanical Phenomena - Project Overview

As part of a US-ROK collaborative I-NERI project, a comprehensive high fidelity reactor core modeling capability is being developed for detailed analysis of current and advanced reactor designs. The work involves the coupling of advanced numerical models such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for thermal hydraulic calculations, whole core discrete integral transport for neutronics calculations, and thermo-mechanical techniques for structural calculations. The product code has been designed to run on parallel high performance computers. This integrated simulation capability will provide a verifiable computational tool to perform intensive studies on the operational and safety characteristics of various design alternatives and to compare the results obtained with presently available tools to those from this high fidelity capability. This paper provides an overview of the project and a summary of the key elements of the integrated code.