Proceeding of M&C2005, Sept 12-15, 2005
A comprehensive high fidelity reactor core modeling capability has been developed for detailed
analysis of current and advanced reactor designs as part of a US-Korea collaborative I-NERI
project. High fidelity is accomplished by integrating highly refined solution modules for the
coupled neutronic, thermal-hydraulic, and thermo-mechanical phenomena. Each solution module
employs methods and models that are formulated faithfully to the first-principles governing the
physics, real geometry, and constituents. Specifically, the critical analysis elements that are
incorporated in the coupled code capability are (1) whole-core neutron transport solution, (2)
ultra-fine-mesh computational fluid dynamics/heat transfer solution, and (3) finite-element-based
thermo-mechanics solution, all obtained with explicit (fuel pin cell level) heterogeneous
representations of the components of the core. The vast computational problem resulting from
such highly refined modeling are solved on massively parallel computers, and serve as
“numerical nuclear reactor (NNR).” Relaxation of modeling parameters are also being pursued
to make problems run on clusters of workstations and PCs for practical applications as well. This
paper describes the features of the NNR, validation of each module and demonstrative coupled
calculation results.
