Multiscale Analysis of Pebble Bed Reactors

– The PEBBED code was developed at the Idaho National Laboratory for design and analysis of pebble-bed high temperature reactors. The diffusion-depletion-pebble-mixing algorithm of the original PEBBED code was enhanced through coupling with the THERMIX-KONVEK code for thermal fluid analysis and by the COMBINE code for online cross section generation. The COMBINE code solves the B-1 or B-3 approximations to the transport equation for neutron slowing down and resonance interactions in a homogeneous medium with simple corrections for shadowing and thermal self-shielding. The number densities of materials within specified regions of the core are averaged and transferred to COMBINE from PEBBED for updating during the burnup iteration. The simple treatment of self-shielding in previous versions of COMBINE led to inaccurate results for cross sections and unsatisfactory core performance calculations. A new version of COMBINE has been developed that treats all levels of heterogeneity using the 1D transport code ANISN. In a 3-stage calculation, slowing down is performed in 167 groups for each homogeneous subregion (kernel, particle layers, graphite shell, control rod absorber annulus, etc.) Particles in a local average pebble are homogenized using ANISN then passed to the next (pebble) stage. A 1D transport solution is again performed over the pebble geometry and the homogenized pebble cross sections are passed to a 1-d radial model of a wedge of the pebble bed core. This wedge may also include homogeneous reflector regions and a control rod region composed of annuli of different absorbing regions. Radial leakage effects are therefore captured with discrete ordinates transport while axial and azimuthal effects are captured with a transverse buckling term. In this paper, results of various PBR models will be compared with comparable models from literature. Performance of the code will be assessed