Abstract
The materials used in nuclear fuel elements and other structural components within a nuclear reactor are subjected to an aggressive operating environment that subjects them to challenging physical conditions and leads to changes to their microstructure and engineering properties over time. Numerical simulation is increasingly used to characterize the response of these materials at both engineering and material scales. Many problems of interest in nuclear systems inherently require a capability to solve for multiple physics systems in a coupled manner. This chapter provides a summary of the governing equations for some of the physics that are typically of interest for these problems, numerical discretization techniques, and methods for solution of the resulting systems of equations. In addition, it provides examples of three important nuclear material simulation applications: engineering-scale nuclear fuel performance, hydride formation in zirconium alloy cladding material, and UO2 microstructure evolution.
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This manuscript has been authored by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517 with the US Department of Energy. The US Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.
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Spencer, B., Schwen, D., Hales, J. (2018). Multiphysics Modeling of Nuclear Materials. In: Andreoni, W., Yip, S. (eds) Handbook of Materials Modeling. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50257-1_131-1
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