March 2011

ORNL Report

The AMP (Advanced MultiPhysics) Nuclear Fuel Performance Code

By:
Clarno, Kevin T; Banfield, James E; Philip, Bobby ; Cochran Jr, William K; Sampath, Rahul S; Allu, Srikanth ; Barai, Pallab ; Simunovic, Srdjan ; Ott, Larry J; Pannala, Sreekanth ; Nukala, Phani K; Dilts, Gary A; Mihaila, Bogdan ; Unal, Cetin ; Yesilyurt, Gokhan ; Lee, Jung
Publication Date:
March 8, 2011

Abstract

The AMP (Advanced MultiPhysics) Nuclear Fuel Performance code is a new, three-dimensional, multi- physics tool that uses state-of-the-art solution methods and validated nuclear fuel models to simulate nominal operation and anticipated operational transients of nuclear fuel. The AMP Nuclear Fuel Perfor- mance code leverages existing validated material models from traditional fuel performance codes and the SCALE/ORIGEN-S spent fuel characterization code to provide an initial capability that is shown to be suffi- ciently accurate for a single benchmark problem and anticipated accuracy for a broad range of problems. The thermo-mechanics-chemical foundation can be solved in a time-dependent or quasi-static approach with any variation of operator-split or fully-coupled solutions at each time step. The AMP Nuclear Fuel Performance code provides interoperable interfaces to leading computational mathematics tools, which will simplify the integration of the code into existing parallel code suites for reactor simulation or lower-length-scale coupling. A baseline validation of the AMP Nuclear Fuel Performance code has been performed through the modeling of an experiment in the Halden Reactor Project (IFA-432), which is the first validation problem incorporated in the FRAPCON Integral Assessment report.