An Eulerian Single-Phase Transport Model for Solid Fission Products in the Molten Salt Fast Reactor: Development of an Analytical Solution for Verification Purposes

Abstract

Nuclear reactor modeling has been shifting, over the last decades, towards full-core multiphysics analysis due to the ever-increasing safety requirements and complexity of the designs of innovative systems. This is particularly true for liquid-fuel reactor concepts such as the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR), given their strong intrinsic coupling between thermal-hydraulics, neutronics and fuel chemistry. In the MSFR, fission products (FPs) are originated within the liquid fuel and are carried by the fuel flow all over the reactor core and through pumping and heat exchange systems. Some of FP species, in the form of solid precipitates, can represent a major design and safety challenge, e.g., due to deposition on solid boundaries, and their distribution in the core is relevant to the design and safety analysis of the reactor. In this regard it is essential, both for the design and the safety assessment of the reactor, the capability to model the transport of solid FPs and their deposition to the boundary (e.g., wall or heat exchanger structures). To this aim, in this study, models of transport of solid FPs in the MSFR are developed and verified. An Eulerian single-phase transport model is developed and integrated in a consolidated multiphysics model of the MSFR based on the open-source CFD library OpenFOAM. In particular, general mixed-type deposition boundary conditions are considered, to possibly describe different kinds of particle-wall interaction mechanisms. For verification purposes, analytical solutions for simple case studies are derived ad hoc based on the extension of the classic Graetz problem to linear decay, distributed source terms and mixed-type boundary conditions. The results show excellent agreement between the two models, and highlight the effects of decay and deposition phenomena of various intensity. The resulting approach constitutes a computationally efficient tool to extend the capabilities of CFD-based multiphysics MSFR calculations towards the simulation of solid fission products transport.