A methodology for the coupling of RAMONA-3B neutron kinetics and TRAC-BF1 thermal-hydraulics

The initial objective of this project was to directly couple the RAMONA and TRAC codes running on different PCs. The idea was to use the best part of each one and eliminate some of their limitations and widen the applicability of these codes to simulate different BWR and system components. It was required to try to minimize the amount of changes to present code subroutines and calculation procedures. If possible, just substitute values obtained in the parallel code. Preliminary results indicated that using a CHAN component of TRAC to model thermal-hydraulic phenomena for each neutronic channel modeled in RAMONA is rather difficult. Large amounts of CPU time consumption are obtained and lots of PCs would make this solution difficult, besides considerable large transients are introduced by the differences in thermal-hydraulic results of these codes. The substitution of the thermal-hydraulics of RAMONA, by the TRAC channel calculations, is possible but simulation of a null transient on both codes must be planed and a gradual change must be controlled by an additional supervisory subroutine. An indirect coupling of these codes, it is therefore proposed, in order to eliminate most of these limitations. In this indirect coupling, a thermal-hydraulic model of the average tube in a bundle and the global channel cooling fluid dynamics is programmed for each neutronic channel while the global reactor vessel and core is modeled by TRAC with just four channels and four rings. Results are more reliable, coupling is simpler and faster simulations are possible.