Development of TUF-ELOCA - a Software Tool for Integrated Single-channel Thermal-Hydraulic and Fuel Element Analyses

Abstract

The TUF-ELOCA tool couples the TUF and ELOCA codes to enable an integrated thermal-hydraulic and fuel element analysis for a single channel during transient conditions. The coupled architecture is based on TUF as the parent process controlling multiple ELOCA executions that simulate the fuel elements behaviour and is scalable to different fuel channel designs. The coupling ensures a proper feedback between the coolant conditions and fuel elements response, eliminates model duplications, and constitutes an improvement from the prediction accuracy point of view. The communication interfaces are based on PVM and allow parallelization of the fuel element simulations. Developmental testing results are presented showing realistic predictions for the fuel channel behaviour during a transient.