A Preliminary Overview of Metal Fuel Models in BISON

BISON is a modern nuclear fuel performance code that has been under development at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) since 2009. It is a finite element-based code capable of solving the energy, mechanics, and species diffusion equations in a fully-coupled sense. BISON also utilizes thermal and mechanical contact algorithms and variety of nonlinear material models. BISON is applicable to steady and transient fuel behavior and supports the use of one-, two-, and three-dimensional meshes. Although thus far used primarily to simulate light water reactor fuel, BISON is designed to be a multi-fuels code. As such, BISON has been used to analyze TRISO-coated particle fuel and metal fuel in rod and plate form, design and interpret fuel irradiation experiments and investigate novel fuel concepts. This publication provides a preliminary list of metal fuel-related material models recently implemented in BISON. Some preliminary results from a simulation of the EBR-II X447 experiment are shown, which begins to demonstrate how all these models work together. A follow-up publication will be presented with more detail at the ANS meeting in New Orleans during the embedded topical meeting titled 'Nuclear Fuels and Structural Materials for the Next Generation Nuclear Reactors'. (authors)