Development of an OpenFOAM Multiphysics Solver for Solid Fission Products Transport in the Molten Salt Fast Reactor

The analysis of innovative reactor concepts such as the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) requires the development of new modeling and simulation tools. In the case of the MSFR, the strong intrinsic coupling between thermal-hydraulics, neutronics and fuel chemistry has led to the adoption of the multiphysics approach as a state-of-the-art paradigm.
One of the peculiar aspects of liquid-fuel reactors such as the MSFR is the mobility of fission products (FPs) in the reactor circuit. Some FP species appear in form of solid precipitates carried by the fuel flow and can deposit on reactor boundaries (e.g., heat exchangers), potentially representing design issues related to the degradation of heat exchange performance or radioactive hotspots. The integration of transport models for solid particles in multiphysics codes is therefore relevant for the prediction of deposited fractions.
To this aim, we develop a multiphysics solver based on the OpenFOAM library to address the issue of solid fission products transport. Single-phase incompressible thermal hydraulics are coupled with neutron diffusion, and advection-diffusion-decay equations are implemented for fission products concentrations. Particle deposition and precipitation are considered as well.
The developed solver is tested on two different MSFR application to showcase the capabilities of the solver in steady-state simulation and to investigate the role of precipitation and turbulence modeling in the determination of particle concentration distributions.