Students

Curtis Lurvey

Summary

Helical-cruciform fuel has become of interest in the nuclear industry due to its potential of increasing burnup, lengthening cycle times, and uprating power. Due to the complexity of this fuel design, there is no way to currently input them into lumped perameter system response code such as TRACE. The complexity exists in capturing the heat transfer, neutronics, and pressure during steady state and transient conditions loss without significantly increasing computational expense. Therefore, this project is investigating simplifications that can be made to evaluate these complex fuel designs within existing codes and validating the results with high fidelity CFD and FE analysis.