Development of a plate-type fuel model for the neutronics and thermal-hydraulics coupled code - SIMMER-III - and its application to the analyses of SPERT

Abstract SIMMER-III, a neutronics and thermal-hydraulics coupled code, was originally developed for core disruptive accident analyses of liquid metal cooled fast reactors. Due to its versatility in investigating scenarios of core disruption, the code has also been extended to the simulation of transients in thermal neutron systems such as the criticality accident at the JCO fuel fabrication plant, and, in recent years, applied to water-moderated thermal research reactor transient studies, too. Originally, SIMMER considered only cylindrical fuel pin geometry. Therefore, implementation of a plate-type fuel model to the SIMMER-III code is of importance for the analysis of research reactors adopting this kind of fuel. Furthermore, validation of the SIMMER-III modeling of light water-cooled thermal reactor reactivity initiated transients is of necessity. This paper presents the work carried out on the SIMMER-III code in the framework of a KIT and IRSN joint activity aimed at providing the code with experimental reactor transient study capabilities. The first step of the job was the implementation of a new fuel model in SIMMER-III. Verification on this new model indicates that it can well simulate the steady-state temperature profile in the fuel. Secondly, three cases with the shortest reactor periods of 5.0 ms, 4.6 ms and 3.2 ms among the Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests (SPERT) performed in the SPERT I D-12/25 facility have been simulated. Comparison of the results between the SIMMER-III simulation and the reported SPERT results indicates that although there is space for further improvement on the modeling of negative feedback mechanisms, with this plate-type fuel model SIMMER-III can well represent the transient phenomena of reactivity driven power excursion.