This course will provide hands-on instruction on the CTF thermal hydraulics subchannel code and the CTFFuel fuel solver code. Both of these tools have been developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and North Carolina State University as part of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) project. These capabilities form key components of the VERA Core Simulator software that has been developed by CASL. This training will focus on standalone applications (thermal-hydraulics and fuel modeling applications) of CTF and CTFFuel.
CTF is a two-fluid, three-field (liquid, vapor, and droplets) thermal-hydraulics code that uses the subchannel modeling approach. It includes solvers for solid objects and nuclear fuel rod geometry, which includes fluid-to-solid heat transfer models and models for capturing fuel rod gap heat transfer (thermal expansion, radiative heat transfer, gap closure, burnup-dependent swelling, etc.). During the CASL program, a separate interface (executable and input deck) has been created to directly model a single fuel rod with prescribed boundary conditions and has been named CTFFuel. Both CTF and CTFFuel have been extensively tested for steady-state and transient PWR applications, depletion simulations, departure from nucleate boiling modeling applications, and crud modeling applications.
This training will provide general background information on the methods and applications of CTF and CTFFuel. The bulk of the course will be spent performing hands-on training, which will involve generating models, executing simulations, and visualizing and analyzing output data. No prior knowledge of CTF will be required. There is no registration fee required for this course. CTF will be made available to attendees in advance of the training along with installation instructions.