Date of Award:

12-2017

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Heng Ban

Committee

Heng Ban

Committee

Nicholas Roberts

Committee

Barton Smith

Committee

Stephen Whitmore

Committee

Marc Maguire

Abstract

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accidents in 2011 sparked considerable interest in the U.S. to develop new nuclear fuel with enhanced accident tolerance. Throughout the development of these new fuel concepts they will be extensively modeled using specialized computer codes and experimentally tested for a variety of different postulated accident scenarios. One accident scenario of interest, reactivity-initiated accident, is a nuclear reactor event involving a sudden increase in fission rate that causes a rapid increase in reactor power and temperature of the fuel which can lead to the failure of the fuel rods and are lease of radioactive material. The focus of this work will be on the fuel performance modeling of reactivity-initiated accidents using the BISON code being developed at Idaho National Laboratory. The overall goal of this work is to provide the best possible modeling predictions for future experimental tests. Accurate predictive capability modeling using BISON is important for safe operation of these tests and provides a cheaper alternative to the expensive experiments.

Checksum

7570ddef41fb6a44c4f5abb9a2d5e0f4

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .