Abstract
The High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Lab is in the research stage of converting its fuel from high-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium. Due to different physical properties of the new fuel and changes to the internal fuel plate design, the current safety basis must be re-evaluated through rigorous computational analyses. One of the areas being explored is the fluid-structure interaction phenomenon due to the interaction of thin fuel plates (50 mils thickness) and the cooling fluid (water). Detailed computational fluid dynamics and fluid-structure interaction simulations have only recently become feasible due to improved numerical algorithms and advancements in computing technology. For many reasons including the already built-in fluid-structure interaction module, COMSOL has been chosen for this complex problem. COMSOL's ability to solve multiphysics problems using a fully-coupled and implicit solution algorithm is crucial in obtaining a stable and accurate solution. Our initial findings show that COMSOL can accurately model such problems due to its ability to closely couple the fluid dynamics and the structural dynamics problems.
