Yellowjacket Gibbs energy minimiser: computing thermochemical equilibrium for multiphysics simulations of molten salt reactors: CANDU fuel : advanced fuel manufacturing and SMR initiatives for a clean energy future 15th international conference on CANDU fuel

Modelling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors is a significant challenge due to the strong coupling between the various physical phenomena in such systems As a result, the traditional operator-splitting based simulation tools must make way for a multi-scale, multi-physics simulation approach A phenomenon of particular interest in the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) is the corrosion of structural materials by high temperature molten salts The Idaho National Laboratory’s Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is an open-source, finite element framework for multi-scale, multi-physics simulations of nuclear reactors and a new MOOSE-based application, namely Yellowjacket, is being developed to simulate corrosion by coupling models of electrodynamics with thermochemistry and phase field This paper presents the design and development of a new Gibbs Energy Minimiser (GEM) within Yellowjacket, its applications in computing chemical potentials and driving forces for corrosion, and its role in enabling coupling of thermochemical equilibrium calculation in multi-scale, multi-physics simulations to model problems of interest in advanced reactors design and deployment (author)