Licos, a fuel performance code for innovative fuel elements or experimental devices design

•The Licos fuel performance code is introduced.•Advanced features, such as dependency algorithm and kriging are described.•First results on three dimensional modelling of the SFR fuel pin are given.•Application to the DIAMINO design computations is discussed.

This paper provides an overview of the Licos fuel performance code which has been developed for several years within the platform pleiades, co-developed by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and its industrial partners Électricité de France (EDF) and AREVA.CEA engineers have been using Licos to back multidimensional thermo-mechanical studies on innovative fuel elements design and experimental device pre-and post-irradiation computations. Studies made with Licos thus encompass a wide range of situations, including most nuclear systems used or studied in France in recent years (PWR, SFR or GFR), normal and off-normal operating conditions, and a large selection of materials (either for fuel, absorber, coolant and cladding).The aim of this paper is to give some insights about some innovative features in the design of Licos (dependency management, kriging, mfront, etc.). We also present two studies that demonstrate the flexibility of this code. The first one shows how Licos can be combined with the Germinal monodimensional fuel performance code to demonstrate the interest of a three dimensional modelling of the fuel relocation phenomenon in the Sodium Fast Reactor fuel pin. The second one describes how Licos was used to model the DIAMINO experiment.