ARTICLE:

• PARALLEL COMPUTING APPLIED TO THE MODELLING OF THE COMPLEX INTERACTING PHENOMENA IN SEVERE FUEL DAMAGE EXPERIMENTS  download article

J. W. De Vaal
AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, KOJ 1J0

J. R. Gauld
AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, KOJ 1J0

M. E. Klein
AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, KOJ 1J0

B. H. McDonald
AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, KOJ 1J0

H.-W. Chiang
AECL Whiteshell Laboratories, Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada, ROE 1L0

D. W. Dormuth
AECL Whiteshell Laboratories, Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada, ROE 1L0

M. E. Lavack
AECL Whiteshell Laboratories, Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada, ROE 1L0

D. R. Whitehouse
AECL Whiteshell Laboratories, Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada, ROE 1L0

G. B. Wilkin
AECL Whiteshell Laboratories, Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada, ROE 1L0

ABSTRACT

Severe fuel damage experiments are being conducted in the Blowdown Test Facility (BTF) in the NRU reactor at Chalk River Laboratories (CRL) to improve our understanding of postulated accidents in CANDU^® reactors. Full analysis of the data obtained from these experiments requires the ability to model reactor neutronics, system thermalhydraulics, fuel performance, fission product release and fission product transport and deposition in the BTF circuit. Best-estimate calculations of these processes require intimate coupling and simultaneous solution of all the equations describing the entire range of physical and chemical phenomena involved. The ELOCA code has been developed at CRL for calculation of CANDU fuel performance under accident conditions and, at Whiteshell Laboratories (WL), the CATHENA code has been developed for analysis of primary circuit thermalhydraulics during these accidents. Also within AECL, the VICTORIA code is used for primary circuit fission product transport analysis, while the GOTHIC code is in use for analyzing containment thermalhydraulics. This paper describes a technology under development at AECL for coupling these codes together, along with a reactor physics kinetics code, for performing integrated analyses of our severe fuel damage experiments. The current technology includes coupling codes to each other in modular routines within a single executable code (i.e., as "subroutine constructs") and by coupling separate executable codes together in a parallel, distributed computing environment (i.e., as "network constructs"). An example of a coupled analysis of a BTF experiment is presented to illustrate the application of the latest coupled code system. This technology, which is being tested in analyzing BTF experiments, will be further developed and ultimately will be available for performing integrated safety analyses of CANDU reactors.
^® CANada Deuterium Uranium, Registered Trademark of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

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