Pronghorn: A Multidimensional Coarse-Mesh Application for Advanced Reactor Thermal Hydraulics

Nuclear Technology · 2021 · 77 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Nuclear engineering

This paper presents an overview of Pronghorn, a multiscale thermal-hydraulic (T/H) application developed by Idaho National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. Pronghorn, built on the open-source finite element Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), leverages state-of-the-art physical models, numerical methods, and nonlinear solvers to deliver fast-running advanced reactor T/H simulation capabilities within a modern software engineering environment. This work summarizes the physical models, multiphysics and multiscale coupling, and numerical discretization in Pronghorn with emphasis on our initial target application to pebble bed reactors (PBRs). A diverse set of applications are shown to depressurized natural circulation in the SANA experiments, forced convection in the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, three-dimensional (3-D)/one-dimensional coupling of Pronghorn and RELAP-7 systems T/H for loop analysis in the High Temperature Reactor Power Module, and forced convection in the Mark-1 Pebble Bed Fluoride-Salt-Cooled High-Temperature Reactor. A multiphysics coupling of Pronghorn, RELAP-7, and Griffin deterministic neutronics for a gas-cooled PBR demonstrates the capability of the MOOSE framework for reactor design calculations. These applications highlight the verification and validation underlying Pronghorn’s software development while emphasizing features that improve upon capabilities offered by legacy tools in areas such as 3-D unstructured meshing, physics modeling, and multiphysics coupling.

Development of Novel Approaches to Anomaly Detection and Surety for Safeguards Data - Year Two and Three Results.

2021-08-01 · 1 citations

Abstract not provided.

How Innovative New Reactors Could Improve Public Acceptance

Elsevier eBooks · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

Multiscale thermal-hydraulic modeling of the pebble bed fluoride-salt-cooled high-temperature reactor

Annals of Nuclear Energy · 2021-01-11 · 33 citations

How Can Nuclear Energy Support a Clean Future

Bulletin of the American Physical Society · 2021-03-17

A Two-Grid and Nonlinear Diffusion Acceleration Method for the <i>S_N</i> Equations with Neutron Upscattering

Journal of Computational and Theoretical Transport · 2020-01-02 · 2 citations

Nonlinear diffusion acceleration (NDA), also known as coarse-mesh finite difference, is a well-known technique that can be applied to accelerate the scattering convergence in neutronics calculations. In multigroup problems, NDA is effective in conjunction with a Gauss-Seidel iteration in energy when there is not much upscattering. However, in the presence of significant upscattering, which occurs in many materials commonly used in nuclear applications, the efficiency of Gauss-Seidel with NDA degrades. A two-grid (TG) acceleration scheme was developed by Adams and Morel for use with standard, unaccelerated SN problems and Gauss-Seidel. Inspired by this two-grid scheme, we derive a new two-grid scheme specific to the NDA equation, which we are calling TG-NDA. By applying the method to several test problems, we find TG-NDA to be a successful acceleration method for problems with significant upscattering.

Multiphysics for nuclear energy applications using a cohesive computational framework

Nuclear Engineering and Design · 2020 · 41 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Computational science

Analysis of an Energy Tuning Assembly for Simulating Nuclear Weapon Environments at the National Ignition Facility

2020-03-01 · 2 citations

Validation of Pronghorn friction-dominated porous media thermal-hydraulics model with the SANA experiments

Nuclear Engineering and Design · 2019-05-23 · 26 citations

A spectral approach for solving the nonclassical transport equation

Journal of Computational Physics · 2019-11-01 · 17 citations