Final Year Project Help: Troubleshooting a TMSR500 Fuel Log Geometry in OpenMC

New Ideas
1

Hello OpenMC community,

I’m a final-year student working on my thesis project, which involves simulating a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR500). I’ve hit a roadblock with the geometry and would be incredibly grateful for some guidance from the experts here.

My goal is to model the fuel log, which should contain graphite moderator slabs and liquid fuel channels, just like in the reference design (Figure 1).

Gemini_Generated_Image_ob1sxhob1sxhob1s
Gemini_Generated_Image_ob1sxhob1sxhob1s1024×1024 125 KB

My current code, however, produces a plot (Figure 2) that doesn’t quite match up.

log_fuel_assembly_clean
log_fuel_assembly_clean4679×2968 151 KB

After many attempts, I suspect I’m making a mistake in how I’m defining the surfaces, regions, or cell fills inside the hexagonal prism universe.

Figure 1: The target design I am trying to achieve.

If anyone has a moment, could you please take a look at my Jupyter Notebook? I’m particularly struggling with:

  1. The logical division of the slab and slot regions.

  2. The most effective method for defining these planar geometries within a hexagonal prism.

  3. Tips to ensure the plot output corresponds accurately with the conceptual model.

As this is for my final project, any advice to help me overcome this challenge would be amazing. The notebook with my full code is attached.

Thank you so much for your time and expertise!

Figure 2: Current Plot Output from My Code This is the top-down view my code is currently generating, which I am trying to fix.

Thorium Molten Salt Reactor 500-Thorcon Model FINAL2 (2.5%) (2).ipynb (637.4 KB)

2

I think you can write a function to define the parallelogram, define the cell of the twelve green material parts around it, and finally define the cell of the middle Y-shaped part. Excluding these cells, you can get the red part and finally complete the modeling.