ideas for academic or hobby projects related to molten salt reactor modeling:
- use open source DFT (or similar) to calculate activation energies for various molten salt and structural material components to calculate temperature dependent reaction rates, with the aim to predict corrosion rates and mass transport rates from hot legs to cold legs, for a given molten salt and combination of structural materials.
- use open source DFT (or similar) to calculate the thermophysical properties (density, heat capacity, and viscosity) as a function of temperature of a given molten salt composition for use in depletion calculation calculations to estimate molten salt thermophysical properties over long term reactor operation, including fuel temperature feedback coefficient, and for the density to be used in the depletion for material definitions.
- review and implement open source uncertainty propagation in openmc using the suggested method given here.
- perform a fuel cycle comparison between existing msr concepts (thermal and fast) using openmc depletion with transfer rates branch openmsr, to include reprocessing features, with the final aim of comparing breeding performance.
- compare openmc run on CPU vs GPU exasmr/openmc for a chosen reactor design, e.g. CAD model of MSRE.
- use cardinal to couple openmc and CFD code NekRS for calculating in-core power and temperature distributions etc., e.g. using CAD model of MSRE or MSFR tutorial.
- couple openmc depletion with open source thermochemistry code, such as thermochimica, to calculate chemical form (speciation) of fission products.
note, that these projects are suggestions of interest to the greater open source molten salt community and are given here as inspiration for academic or hobby projects. the detailed definition of the project scope or work are up to the person themself. instead if a student is interested in one of these projects but needs an advisor, they should find their own advisor and define the project work and scope themselves. it’s encouraged to make the project open source and available on github, and please share your finding and/or final project submission here by opening an issue and linking to the github repository.