Mechanical, thermal and diffusional quantities remapping on an adaptive mesh to model the macroscopic fuel redistribution in pellets with the F.E. code CAST3M

C. Guerin (1) , A. Letellier (1) , G. Folzan (1)

1 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)

Modelling of fuel pin behavior during irradiation associated to experiments improves the understanding of the important mechanisms that could impact fuel assembly performance. Modelling also allows to quickly test the impact of material properties on fuel behavior.Coupled thermal, mechanical and species diffusion modelling is performed in the PLEIADES fuel performance software environment which includes the finite element solver CAST3M. Modelling of the central void formation in fast neutron reactor fuel requires a mesh adaptation. Physical quantities must be remapped from a mesh to the next one. We describe a CAST3M mock-up to calculate thermo-mechanical-diffusional fuel behavior during void formation.

Keywords: CAST3M; fuel modelling; remapping

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Nuclear Theory [nucl-th]

C. Guerin, A. Letellier, G. Folzan. Mechanical, thermal and diffusional quantities remapping on an adaptive mesh to model the macroscopic fuel redistribution in pellets with the F.E. code CAST3M. EMR 2015 - The Energy and Material Research Conference, Mar 2015, Madrid, Spain. ⟨cea-02506824⟩