Recent developments for molten salt systems in Thermochimica

Thermodynamically Informed Nuclear Fuel Codes—A Review and Perspectives

“…This was achieved by storing the results from THERMOCHIMICA at every single node for a particular time step, which is used as a starting point for each node in the subsequent time step [41]. As reported by Poschmann et al, this re-initialization scheme improved computational performance by one to two orders of magnitude for a number of problems, including irradiated UO 2 fuel with up to 22 fission products and molten salt FLiBe with UF 4 and 6 fission products [42].…”

“…The calibrated model worked very well for U-Zr fuel, but had some limitations when applied to U-Pu-Zr fuel [45]. Clearly, there are both strengths and weaknesses of both works from Poschmann et al [42] and Hirschhorn et al [45]. The former case was able to better capture the thermochemistry of the fuel, including fission product chemistry of irradiated fuel; however, it did not capture phase kinetics.…”

Survey of Relevant Data from the MSRP to Guide Development of MSR Chemistry Modeling Benchmarks

“…The first publicly released version was made available in early FY22 (MSTDB-TC v1.2) [9], with updated versions also recently released (v1.3 and v2.0). Similarly, first developed with support from other DOE:NE research programs, the Thermochimica GEM solver was initially developed at ORNL [59] and continues to be developed by Ontario Tech University [60].…”

Development of a Gibbs Energy Minimiser for the MOOSE-based Corrosion Modelling App Yellowjacket and Validation of MSTDB

“…Thermochimica is also the only available open-source tool capable of performing calculations with the MSTDB-TC, to the best of the authors' knowledge, thanks to the implementation of the modified quasichemical model in the quadruplet approximation [43]. This implementation has been benchmarked with FactSage [44] (version 8.0), which has also been used to check tests displaying unexpected behavior.…”