A New Radial Power Distribution Construction Model for Nuclear Fuel Performance Simulation Code FUPAC

Abstract

Radial power distribution is important for temperature distribution calculations in fuel rod performance simulation code. In order to reconstruct the radial power profiles in one model for different types of fuel, such as UO₂, MOX, UO₂-Gd₂O₃, integral fuel burnable absorber(IFBA), etc., this paper proposes a new radial power distribution construction model. Compared with traditional radial power distribution interpolation method which is based on All Parameters Separated way (APS), the new RPD reconstruction method in this paper, called Partial Parameters Separated method (PPS), only use few transient parameters to construct the RPD by interpolation. PPS method has been used in fuel thermal-mechanical analysis code FUPAC. The numerical results show that PPS model can be used to reconstruct RPD for UO₂, UO₂-Gd₂O₃, IFBA fuel rods, and has an excellent precision. The PPS method, which not only can be used in current PWR’s fuel, but also used in new type fuel, such as ATF, has a good validity and practicability.