Abstracts and Available Papers Presented at the
1999 International RERTR Meeting

PROGRESS ON DART CODE OPTIMIZATION

Taboada, Horacio¹ Rest, Jeffrey² Solís, Diego¹

¹Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, República Argentina

²Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, USA

ABSTRACT

This work consists about the progress made on the design and development of a new optimized version of DART code (DART-P), a mechanistic computer model for the performance calculation and assessment of aluminum dispersion fuel.  It is part of a collaboration agreement between CNEA and ANL in the area of Low Enriched Uranium Advanced Fuels. It is held by the Implementation Arrangement for Technical Exchange and Cooperation in the Area of Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, signed on October 16, 1997 between US DOE and the National Atomic Energy Commission of the Argentine Republic. DART optimization is a biannual program; it is operative since February 8, 1999 and has the following goals:

1. Design and develop a new DART calculation kernel for implementation within a parallel processing architecture
2. Design and develop new user-friendly I/O routines to be resident on Personal Computer (PC)/WorkStation (WS) platform.
   
   1. The new input interface will be designed and developed by means of a Visual interface, able to guide the user in the construction of the problem to be analyzed with the aid of a new database (described in item 3, below). The new I/O interface will include input data check controls in order to avoid corrupted input data.
   2. The new output interface will be designed and developed by means of graphical tools, able to translate numeric data output into “on line” graphic information.
3. Design and develop a new irradiated materials database, to be resident on PC/WS platform, so as to facilitate the analysis of the behavior of different fuel and meat compositions with DART-P. Currently, a different version of DART is used for oxide, silicide, and advanced alloy fuels.
4. Develop rigorous general inspection algorithms in order to provide valuable DART-P benchmarks.
5. Design and develop new models, such as superplasticity, elastoplastic feedback, improved models for the calculation of fuel deformation and the evolution of the fuel microstructure for inclusion into DART-P
6.  Develop a DART-P capability for the analysis of dispersion fuel behavior during transient and/or accident conditions. The work will include the development of a DART-P restart-from-dump capability.

Up to date, issues 2 and 3 were designed and developed and they are under evaluation. These new facilities allow the user to have a friendlier guide to design the problem to study and to display graphically the outcome. The material database allowed the code unification, with the subsequent code support simplification.

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