Development of a new Thermal-Hydraulic Module for FRENETIC, a Code for the Multiphysics Analysis of Liquid Metal-Cooled Reactors

The present paper describes the development of a new thermal-hydraulic (TH) module for FRENETIC, a multi-physics code for the full-core simulation of liquid metal-cooled fast reactors, developed at Politecnico di Torino. The code performs steady state and transient neutronic (NE) and TH coupled calculations, while maintaining a relatively low computational cost thanks to the adoption of simplified physical models. The NE module implements the nodal formulation of the multigroup neutron diffusion equations with delayed neutron precursors, whereas the TH module treats the reactor hexagonal assemblies as separate channels, which are individually modelled as 1D in the axial direction, accounting for the thermal coupling in the horizontal direction. The new TH module is more robust and portable while providing improved performance with respect to the previous implementation, also thanks to the adopted OpenMP parallelization. Some physics aspects that were previously neglected, such as the thermal inertia of non-fuel rods, have also been included. The development was carried out in accordance with current best practices for code design, implementation and testing, thus rendering the code easier to be maintained and possibly extended in the future. The code usability has also been improved by means of a set of Python classes purposely developed to simplify the input generation and post-processing phases. This can potentially widen the usage of FRENETIC within the fast reactor community for the simulation of full-core coupled NE-TH transients and/or as a platform to test new solution methods. The paper also includes the application of this new FRENETIC version to a representative configuration of the Advanced Lead-cooled Fast Reactor European Demonstrator (ALFRED) reactor core.