Research & Development
Materials Performance and Optimization (MPO)
Enabling Improved Fuel Performance through Predictive Simulation
Objectives and Strategies
- Develop improved materials performance models for fuels, cladding, and structural materials, and integrate those models into a fuel system performance and response capability
- Identification of operating and safety margins as the performance metric for successful application of CASL-developed fuel modeling capabilities
Requirements Drivers
- Deliver engineering scale fuel performance models and materials physics-based constitutive models to enable CASL solutions
- Deliver improved physics and chemistry insight via constitutive relations and behavioral models
- Successfully work across Focus Areas to integrate complex, multi-physics solutions required for predicting reactor operational impacts & integrating fuel performance tools into the VERA-Core Simulator
Outcomes and Impact
- Successfully demonstrated capability for predicting CRUD and pellet-clad interaction (PCI), and working to fully benchmark and improve predictability through implementing improved models of key phenomena
- Demonstrated improvements in thermodynamic databases for CRUD species
- Development of advanced models of fretting wear
- Improved material property models, with improved physical fidelity, to enable engineering scale fuel performance predictions