Numerical studies of nuclear traveling waves in a supercritical water cooled fast reactor

Zhang, Dalin; Chen, Xue-Nong; Gabrielli, F.; Rineiski, A.; Maschek, W.; Schulenberg, Thomas S.

doi:10.1016/j.pnucene.2011.05.027

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…5 cm per node. Physically, the pin bundle in a subassembly (SA) is divided into 33 movable blocks, which is similar to the case studied in (Zhang et al, 2011) and is illustrated in Fig. 1.…”

Section: Numerical Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a first attempt, only a 1 D problem is con sidered here. The calculation scheme is built up for the axial fuel shuffling strategy (Zhang et al, 2011), in which the core is firstly divided into several cells along the axial direction and then the initial enrichment, total thermal power and fuel shuffling speed (corre sponding to burn up time steps) are adjusted for achieving the asymptotic state at the desired k eff level. In this paper, the ECCO code with JEFF3.1 (The JEFF 3.1 Nuclear Data Library, 2006) data library is used to generate microscopic cross sections of the nuclides, and the ERANOS code is adopted to perform the neutron ics and the burn up calculations with 40 energy groups and 80 fis sion products by applying the nodal diffusion model of VARIANT.…”

Section: Axial Fuel Shuffling Strategy and Calculation Schemementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a continuation to the numerical SCWFR study (Zhang et al, 2011), the SCWFR seed SA/pin design (Ishiwatari et al, 2001) are chosen and modified. Only a one dimensional case is considered in current numerical simulations and the core is assumed to be filled with fuel subassemblies.…”

Section: Configuration Of Fuel Assembly and Pins And Coolant Density mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore it is very attractive to solve this problem with light water reactor technologies, which are much mature industrially than the sodium technology. There were several attempts to apply the TWR concept for a supercritical water reac tor (SCWR) (Schulenberg et al, 2008;Ishiwatari et al, 2001;Mori, 2005;Monti, 2009), which show that the fuel utilization improve ment potential in SCWR is high, but up to now these attempts are not fully successful (Chen et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2011). The rea son is that there is still too much water in the upper core part, the neutron spectrum is quite soft and the breeding is not sufficient.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boiling water cooled travelling wave reactor

Chen

Gabrielli

Rineiski

et al. 2019

Annals of Nuclear Energy

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This study investigates the principal possibility of a boiling water cooled travelling wave reactor that can potentially improve the natural uranium utilisation in Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), and more general in water cooled reactors, appreciably. A strong variation of the water density along the core height makes favourable the nuclear fission in the lower core part and the fuel breeding in the upper one. A serial axial fuel shuffling scheme is considered for establishing a kind of travelling wave. The fresh natural uranium oxide fuel is loaded from the core top. The irradiated fuel is discharged from the core bottom. The water coolant at the saturation point at a near atmospheric pressure comes from the bottom of the core, as in conventional BWRs. The asymptotic state of the breeding/burning wave is obtained, including its major characteristics, such as power density distribution, coolant mass flow rate, and the fuel shuffling speed. The employed simulation model for the water density variation in axial direction is based on a slip ratio approximation for two phase flows. The burn up calculations are performed with the ERANOS2.2 code, in which the models of axial fuel shuffling and coolant density variation have been implemented. The numerical results for 1D models are encouraging and show that the breeding performance is sufficient to keep the core critical in the asymptotic state, and a maximum burn up of about 37% can be reached, meaning that the natural uranium utilization in BWR can be improved by several ten times compared to conventional water cooled reactors. Feasibility related issues, such as the void reactivity effect and crit ical heat flux limit, has been checked and discussed. Further efforts are needed to establish a viable design based on the ideas proposed in the paper.

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Section: Numerical Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Axial Fuel Shuffling Strategy and Calculation Schemementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Configuration Of Fuel Assembly and Pins And Coolant Density mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boiling water cooled travelling wave reactor

Chen

Gabrielli

Rineiski

et al. 2019

Annals of Nuclear Energy

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“…The axial fuel shuffling is not common in convectional reactors, although the axial fuel shuffling (motion) can be dealt with theoretically and numerically much more easily than the radial one. This is why one had considered the TWR concept first in the axial or plane direction [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Nevertheless we have already started to simulate the radial fuel shuffling theoretically and numerically [17,18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymptotic Solutions of Serial Radial Fuel Shuffling

Chen

Kiefhaber

2015

Energies

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Abstract:In this paper, the mechanism of traveling wave reactors (TWRs) is investigated from the mathematical physics point of view, in which a stationary fission wave is formed by radial fuel drifting. A two dimensional cylindrically symmetric core is considered and the fuel is assumed to drift radially according to a continuous fuel shuffling scheme. A one-group diffusion equation with burn-up dependent macroscopic coefficients is set up. The burn-up dependent macroscopic coefficients were assumed to be known as functions of neutron fluence. By introducing the effective multiplication factor keff, a nonlinear eigenvalue problem is formulated. The 1-D stationary cylindrical coordinate problem can be solved successively by analytical and numerical integrations for associated eigenvalues keff. Two representative 1-D examples are shown for inward and outward fuel drifting motions, respectively. The inward fuel drifting has a higher keff than the outward one. The 2-D eigenvalue problem has to be solved by a more complicated method, namely a pseudo time stepping iteration scheme. Its 2-D asymptotic solutions are obtained together with certain eigenvalues keff for several fuel inward drifting speeds. Distributions of the neutron flux, the neutron fluence, the infinity multiplication factor kinf and the normalized power are presented for two different drifting speeds.

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Numerical studies of stepwise radial fuel shuffling in a traveling wave reactor

Zhang

Zheng

et al. 2014

Sci. China Technol. Sci.

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Numerical studies of nuclear traveling waves in a supercritical water cooled fast reactor

Cited by 10 publications

References 11 publications

Boiling water cooled travelling wave reactor

Boiling water cooled travelling wave reactor

Asymptotic Solutions of Serial Radial Fuel Shuffling

Numerical studies of stepwise radial fuel shuffling in a traveling wave reactor

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