Publications
Nuclear Fuel Cycle (NFC) Technology and Policy Program
Modeling the Steady-state Behavior of Metal Fuels in Liquid-Metal Fast Reactors
A. Karahan, J. Buongiorno, and M.S. Kazimi
MIT-NFC-TR-107 (April 2009)
Abstract
Computational models to analyze in-reactor behavior of U-Zr and U-Pu-Zr metallic alloy fuel pins have been developed and implemented in a new code, the Fuel Engineering And Structural analysis Tool (FEAST). FEAST consists of several modules working in coupled form with an explicit numerical algorithm. These modules are (1) Fission Gas Release and Swelling, (2) Fuel Constituent Redistribution, (3) Temperature Distribution, (4) Fuel-Clad Chemical Interaction and (5) Fuel-Clad Mechanical Analysis.
The main purpose of FEAST is to model metal fuel performance by adopting non-empirical approaches to increase the ability to extrapolate the existing database with a reasonable accuracy. As a consequence, mechanistic models for the fission gas release and swelling module, the fuel constituent redistribution and the Fuel Clad Chemical Interaction, were adopted. The mechanical analysis and temperature distribution modules adopt 1D approaches.
The code was benchmarked against the available EBR-II experimental database. The results show that FEAST is able to predict the important phenomena such as axial fuel swelling, cladding strain and fission gas release satisfactorily. Moreover, a code to code benchmark has been performed against ALFUS by using PHENIX reactor irradiation data. Again, the agreement is reasonably good for fuel swelling, while some discrepancies are observed in the cladding strain predictions.
