Publications
Design of a high fidelity core simulator for analysis of pellet CLAD interaction
The Tiamat code is being developed by CASL (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs) as an integrated tool for predicting pellet-clad interaction and improving the high-fidelity core simulator. Tiamat is a large-scale parallel code that couples the the multi-dimensional Bison-CASL fuel performance code on every fuel rod with the COBRA-TF (CTF) sub-channel thermal-hydraulics code and either the Insilico or MPACT neutronics codes. Tiamat solves a transient problem where each time step is subcycled using Picard iteration to converge the fully-coupled nonlinear system. This report discusses the solution algorithms and software design of the simulator. Results are shown for a five assembly cross and compared against a separate core simulator developed by CASL. Tiamat has demonstrated that it can compute quantities of interest for analyzing pellet-clad interaction.