Burnup-control drum coupling characteristics investigation of lead-bismuth eutectic-cooled solid reactor

As an advanced research tool, neutronics and thermal-hydraulics coupling have a wide range of promising applications in the field of nuclear energy. This paper develops a burnup-control drum coupling code based on the Monte Carlo code RMC and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program STAR-CCM +. The dynamic adjustment of the control drums' position and more realistic prediction of reactor neutronics and thermalhydraulics is achieved by updating the nuclide density, solving the control drum value function and updating the neutronics model in the process of burnup calculation. The core of a lead-bismuth-cooled solid reactor was also studied to investigate the neutronics and thermal-hydraulics properties of the solid core when the effective multiplication factor was kept at about 1.0, and the core's power and temperature variation patterns during the lifetime were obtained. The results of the study show that the simulation of the coupling code achieves the design purpose. In addition, the solid core's maximum fuel and cladding temperatures decrease with the deepening of the burnup.