Investigation of bond graphs for nuclear reactor simulations

This work proposes a simple and effective approach to modeling multiphysics nuclear reactor problems using bond graphs. The conventional method of modeling the coupled multiphysics transients in nuclear reactors is operator splitting, which treats the single physics individually and exchanges the information at every time step. This approach has limited accuracy, and so there is interest in the development of methods for fully coupled physics simulation. The bond graph formalism was first introduced to solve the multiphysics problem in electromechanical systems. Over the years, it has been used in many fields including nuclear engineering, but with limited scope due to its perceived impracticality in large systems. In this work, the bond graph formalism is for the first time applied to neutron transport, and coupled to heat transfer in a nuclear reactor. Fully coupled 1D diffusion reaction model is derived using bond graphs, and the transient solution obtained using a proof-of-concept bond graph processing code. The bond graph-based approach to coupled nuclear reactor simulation was shown to be accurate and stable. Suggestions are made for the expansion of the approach to larger problems and higher fidelity simulations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Sosnovsky, Eugeny

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Benoit Forget.

• Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62609

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/62609