CarbonMonoxideProduction

Computes CO production in oxide fuel based on the Proksch or GA correlation.

This Postprocessor computes carbon monoxide production in an oxide fuel block. The following two models are implemented: Proksch and GA. The GA and Proksch models only apply to a UO fuel kernel.

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The GA model expects the surface temperature of the fuel kernel while the Proksch model expects the TRISO particle surface temperature.

GA model

The CO yield (atoms/fission) is given by (Kovacs et al., 1985):

It has a 0.625 limit (taken from PARFUME) while the original reference has a 0.61 limit. It is used primarily for comparison to historic evaluations. It applies only to UO.

Proksch model

The Proksch model uses the empirical correlation from Proksch (Proksch et al., 1982). It only applies to UO. Equation 1 in this paper is:

where is the oxygen release at the end of irradiation (atoms/fission), is the irradiation time (days), and is the time averaged particle surface temperature (K).

Converting time to seconds and solving for : where is the irradiation time and is the time integrated surface temperature of the TRISO particle (from coupled post processor). (Note that to get the time averaged surface temperature, the time integrated surface temperature is divided by total time.)

The Proksch paper further explains that the ratio is diffusion limited at an equilibrium maximum value given by Equation 2: where is the fission fraction of U and is the fission fraction of Pu plus Pu.

Only U fissions are included here ( = 1, = 0) such that is limited to 0.4.

Assuming all the oxygen forms carbon monoxide, CO yield .

CO Production

Assuming each oxygen atom combines with a carbon atom, and expressing the CO produced in moles: where is the time and volume integration of the fission density rate (from a coupled post processor).

Example Input Syntax

[Postprocessors<<<{"href": "../../syntax/Postprocessors/index.html"}>>>]
  [co_production]
    type = CarbonMonoxideProduction<<<{"description": "Computes CO production in oxide fuel based on the Proksch or GA correlation.", "href": "CarbonMonoxideProduction.html"}>>>
    total_fissions<<<{"description": "The name of the postprocessor containing the total fissions."}>>> = total_fissions
    initial_enrichment<<<{"description": "initial enrichment fraction of U235 (wt%)"}>>> = 0.14029
    execute_on<<<{"description": "The list of flag(s) indicating when this object should be executed. For a description of each flag, see https://mooseframework.inl.gov/source/interfaces/SetupInterface.html."}>>> = 'initial timestep_end'
  []
[]
(test/tests/carbon_monoxide_production/carbon_monoxide_production_test.i)

Input Files

References

  1. William J. Kovacs, Karl Bongartz, and Dan T. Goodin. High-temperature gas-cooled reactor fuel pressure vessel performance models. Nuclear Technology, 68(3):344–354, 1985. doi:10.13182/NT85-A33580.[BibTeX]
  2. E. Proksch, A. Strigl, and H Nabielek. Production of carbon monoxide during burn-up of $\mathrm UO_2$ kerneled HTR fuel particles. Journal of Nuclear Material, 107:280–285, 1982.[BibTeX]