Design, simulation, and analysis of a microreactor experiment at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center

In this era of nuclear renaissance, industry and government programs are aggressively pursuing the accelerated development of advanced reactor designs, such as micro reactors. Advanced reactor technologies and concepts require critical experiments to validate predictions made with multiphysics codes used for design and predictive performance. Such experiments aid in the licensing of the technology as well as the benchmarking and validation of existing reactor simulation tools. Some tests can be conducted at the NCERC facility, as previously demonstrated with the KRUSTY and Hypatia experiments. Prior to conducting tests, a robust process of designing, simulating, and analysing experiments is required. This work describes the computational methodology in which prototypic microreactor experiments are designed for demonstration at the NCERC facility with a focus on moderated heat pipe systems. A variety of physics codes, such as MCNPQ, Whisper, and Abaqus Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are employed in these analyses. To simulate transients, future work includes developing a framework with the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) environment to couple multiple FEA physics codes. (authors)