DEVELOPMENT AND VERIFICATION OF T-TRACE/PANTHER COUPLED CODE.

Multi-physics coupled simulations have become increasingly important during the last two decades being one of the major field of application in the nuclear technology. The nuclear reactors themselves are complex systems whose responses are driven by interactions between neutron kinetics, thermal-hydraulics, heat transfer, mechanics and chemistry. Probably, in a nuclear system, the most complex and important feedback effect takes place between the core neutron kinetics and thermal-hydraulics. The development of coupled thermal-hydraulic -neutron kinetics codes is a recurrent field of research for the nuclear industry. This contribution, developed in the Consortium for Nuclear Power (CNP) framework, has the objective of develop a dynamic coupling, using TCP/IP based socket communication, between the thermal-hydraulic system code T-TRACE, Tractebel-ENGIE version of the latest US NRC TRACE release, and the multi-group 3-D nodal diffusion and core physics code PANTHER, developed and maintained by EDF Energy (UK). As a first step of the development, a fully temporally explicit coupling scheme has been developed between TRACE and PANTHER based on a boundary conditions exchange at the core level at each temporal iteration. The OECD TMI MSLB benchmark has been selected as verification scenario for testing the ongoing developing T-TRACE/PANTHER coupled code. The developed coupled code is benchmarked code-to-code against TRACE/PARCS and T-RELAP5/PANTHER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]