| About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
Materials Science & Technology 2019
|
| Symposium
|
Materials for Nuclear Applications
|
| Presentation Title |
Spectral Thermal Conductivity Predictions in UO2 with Xe Inclusions |
| Author(s) |
Jackson Harter, Aria Hosseini, Todd Palmer, Alex Greaney |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Jackson Harter |
| Abstract Scope |
Current and next generation nuclear fuels suffer a common problem: production and evolution of gaseous fission products creates phonon scattering centers that lower thermal conductivity (κ) in the fuel. Uranium dioxide (UO2) is the fuel used in most nuclear power reactors; during fuel burn up, insoluble xenon precipitates into a dispersion of Xe bubbles which evolve and significantly degrade thermal conductivity.
To enable prediction of the thermal conductivity of UO2 fuel pins in operation we have developed a temperature coupled deterministic phonon transport simulator which solves the Boltzmann transport equation on geometric domains spanning nano- to micro-scales and predicts spectral κ using material properties obtained from ab initio simulations. We will demonstrate our approach on micro-scale geometric domains of UO2 with Xe inclusions and compare to existing data. |