Abstract
Improved nuclear fuel is the primary technology required for the realization of advanced nuclear reactor technologies. Central to the development of fuel with enhanced reliability and accident performance, extended burn up, ease of fabrication and reprocessing is the need to develop a fundamental understanding of the nuclear fuel elements and materials involved. Modeling the fuel material and fuel elements behavior is complicated due to the closee interaction of neutronics, chemistry and thermo-mechanical phenomena. Due to this complexity of the problem, scalable algorithms and approaches that target relevant phenomena at appropriate time and length scales are of interest. This presentation discusses the current status of some of the technologies that need to be further developed in order to better understand not only the fundamental materials science issues of fuel material but also the macroscopic engineering simulation of fuel rods. In particular, the following issues will be discussed:
� Need for developing scalable macroscopic engineering fuel rod models that couple large-scale three-dimensional thermo-mechanics models of nuclear fuel elements with neutronics and other relevant physics
� Scalable algorithms for understanding the brittle fracture of fuel material due to high thermal gradients
� Algorithms for coupling various phenomena at wide-ranging time scales
