Progress Toward Revolutionary Reactor Designs using Nature-Inspired Nuclear Fuel

Nearly all modern nuclear fuels are designed around basic geometries such as spheres, rectangular prisms, and right cylinders, with the latter (e.g., rods, pins) being the most prevalent in today’s commercial nuclear power plants. Geometric tuning among these options offers various advantages and trade-offs which designers continue to optimize as they search for incremental gains in system performance, but the advent of additive manufacturing provides an opportunity to break free from these traditions using nature-inspired geometries for massive gains in performance. One leading option uses triply periodic minimal surface equations to create intertwined lattices which offer neutronic improvements, structural enhancement, and considerable upgrades in heat transfer behaviors. This approach is a potential game changer for the advanced reactor designs of the future but does not violate the great axiom of engineering: that every design improvement comes at a cost. In this case some of the key challenges to overcome include the development of suitable AM techniques, developing computer simulation techniques for these complex geometries, and obtaining thermal hydraulic data to aid understanding in optimizing the trade-offs between heat transfer and hydraulic resistance. An ongoing project has been tackling each of these challenges with several advancements. This paper provides a summary of research and development outcomes in these areas alongside plans and potentials for the future of this revolutionary approach to nuclear fuel technology.