3D numerical study of LBE-cooled fuel assembly in MYRRHA using SIMMER-IV code

Abstract The present paper is based on the work carried out in the framework of the European FP7 project MAXSIMA, in which MYRRHA safety studies are performed. MYRRHA is a pool-type 100 MWth system with MOX fuel designed to operate both in ADS and critical modes. It uses lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) as primary coolant. The MOX fuel has almost the same density as the LBE coolant. In case of pin failure fuel pellets may break into chunks and particles carried by the coolant upwards and redistributed in the reactor pool. The transmutation group at IKET/KIT mainly with the numerical analysis tool is involved for studying severe accidents for MYRRHA reactor design. The highlight of the current work is that 3D simulations with explicit modelling on the gaps between fuel assemblies and 3D macroscopic pin bundle models are performed for the first time using a reactor safety analysis code, SIMMER-IV, with 3D geometry. In this paper, the numerical analyses are conducted for a single fuel assembly blockage and 19 pin-rods on basis of an LBE coolant experiment. The 3D analysis has been applied with both scales namely fuel assembly scale and pin bundle scale. For the fuel assembly scale, the evaluation of a single fuel assembly blockage using non-axisymmetric geometry configuration in the subcritical mode is addressed. For the pin bundle scale, the 3D pin bundle simulations show a good agreement from the experiment conducted at KALLA liquid metal laboratory. Note that this is the only code applied by now for blockage analyses after pin failure in MYRRHA. The current work has formed a solid basis for the safety analysis for MYRRHA in the future.