Object-oriented multi-physics applied to spatial reactor dynamics

Abstract

Traditionally coupled field reactor analysis has been carried out using several loosely coupled solvers, each having been developed independently from the others. In the field of multi-physics, the current generation of object-oriented toolkits provides robust close coupling of multiple fields on a single framework. This research investigates the suitability of such frameworks, in particular the Open-source Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) framework, for the solution of spatial reactor dynamics problems. For this a subset of the theory of the Time-dependent Neutronics and Temperatures (TINTE) code, a time-dependent two-group diffusion solver, was implemented in the OpenFOAM framework. This newly created code, called diffusionFOAM, was tested for a number of steady-state and transient cases. The solver was found to perform satisfactorily, despite a number of numerical issues. The object-oriented structure of the framework allowed for rapid and efficient development of the solver. Further investigations suggest that more advanced transport methods and higher order spatial discretization schemes can potentially be implemented using such a framework as well.