Assessment of the Thermal-Structural Characteristics of Core Components in a Preconceptual Design of the Transformational Challenge Reactor

Abstract

The Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) is a megawatt-scale microreactor currently being designed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The TCR will demonstrate the feasibility of designing, building, and operating a micro-reactor using advanced manufacturing technologies with conventionally manufactured fuel. This paper focuses on evaluating the thermal and structural characteristics of the components within a preconceptual core design of the TCR. To accomplish this a conjugate heat transfer model was developed with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, Star-CCM+ [1] and a thermalmechanical model was developed with the finite element analysis (FEA) code, Abaqus [2].