Towards grain-scale modelling of the release of radioactive fission gas from oxide fuel. Part II: Coupling SCIANTIX with TRANSURANUS

The behaviour of the fission gas plays an important role in the fuel rod performance. In a previous work, we presented a physics-based model describing intra-and inter-granular behaviour of radioactive fission gas. The model was implemented in SCIANTIX, a mesoscale module for fission gas behaviour, and assessed against the CONTACT 1 irradiation experiment. In this work, we present the multi-scale coupling between the TRANSURANUS fuel performance code and SCIANTIX, used as mechanistic mod-ule for stable and radioactive fission gas behaviour. We exploit the coupled code version to reproduce two integral irradiation experiments involving standard fuel rod segments in steady-state operation (CONTACT 1) and during successive power transients (HATAC C2). The simulation results demonstrate the predictive capabilities of the code coupling and contribute to the integral validation of the models implemented in SCIANTIX.(c) 2022 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study investigates the behavior of fission gas and presents a physics-based model for describing its intra-and inter-granular behavior. By coupling this model with the TRANSURANUS fuel performance code, the authors simulate two irradiation experiments and validate the implemented models in SCIANTIX.