Validation of the 1D+2D thermal-hydraulic module of the FRENETIC code

The FRENETIC code for the dynamic simulation of LFR cores with closed hexagonal fuel elements at a reduced computational cost has been recently developed at Politecnico di Torino by the research group of nuclear engineering. The tool is composed by two modules, the neutronic module and the thermal-hydraulic (TH) module, that can be run together to solve the coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic model equations, or separately to analyze only the thermal-hydraulic or neutronic behavior. The TH module has been successfully validated against experimental data from the CIRCE facility at ENEA Brasimone, as far as the 1D TH analysis along each fuel assembly (FA) is concerned. The results of a first full core TH benchmark against another computational tools (RELAP5-3D®) are reported here, to check the horizontal 2D coupling model in FRENETIC.