Investigation of Ring-heterogeneous Geometry Approximation for Efficient and Practical SFR Analysis

A novel geometry approximation scheme named ring-heterogeneous approximation for intermediate resolution multiphysics analysis of SFRs is presented. This approach particularly targets neutronics coupled with thermo-mechanics feedback, which dominate the passive safety of SFR designs. The ring-heterogeneous approximation casts an array of pins into volume-preserving bands of materials that constitute the pins. It allows to efficiently simulate SFRs with an unstructured mesh and also to explicitly consider the deformation of each material by retaining their heterogeneity. Verification results with single assembly and core problems of the ABTR benchmark demonstrated that the ring-heterogeneous approximation is a reasonable approximation for SFRs. For a 2D full core problem, the ring-heterogeneous approximation significantly reduced the number of elements by at least a factor of 70 from a fully-heterogeneous mesh while almost exactly preserving the reference fully-heterogeneous solutions with the RMS error of only 0.02% in the ring-wise fission reaction rate.