A coupling methodology for mesoscale-informed nuclear fuel performance codes

This study proposes an approach for capturing the effect of microstructural evolution on reactor fuel performance by coupling a mesoscale irradiated microstructure model with a finite element fuel performance code. To achieve this, the macroscale system is solved in a parallel, fully coupled, fully-implicit manner using the preconditioned Jacobian-free Newton Krylov (JFNK) method. Within the JFNK solution algorithm, microstructure-influenced material parameters are calculated by the mesoscale model and passed back to the macroscale calculation. Due to the stochastic nature of the mesoscale model, a dynamic fitting technique is implemented to smooth roughness in the calculated material parameters. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on a simple model of a reactor fuel pellet. In the model, INL’s BISON fuel performance code calculates the steady-state temperature profile in a fuel pellet and the microstructure-influenced thermal conductivity is determined with a phase field model of irradiated microstructures. This simple multiscale model demonstrates good nonlinear convergence and near ideal parallel scalability. By capturing the formation of large mesoscale voids in the pellet interior, the multiscale model predicted the irradiation-induced reduction in the thermal conductivity commonly observed in reactors.