Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs) are studied in the frame of the OCAPIE project, coordinated by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Genova.
The purpose of this work is to implement a multiphysics model to describe the coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic behavior of the core of ALFRED, that is the demonstrator reactor for LFR technology.
We combined, in a single computational environment, the two codes for Monte Carlo based neutronic and computational fluid-dynamic simulations.
The two codes are coupled, such that fuel material temperatures of fuel assemblies are produced by OpenFOAM and read by Serpent. The latter one updates nuclide cross sections in order to compute volumetric power distributions, which in turn are the input of the thermal-hydraulic code.
The movie below shows the volumetric power distribution (W/m3) within the ALFRED fuel assemblies.
Lead and maximum fuel temperatures are instead figured here.
