Adjoint-based sensitivity analysis of circulating liquid fuel system for the multiphysics model of molten salt reactor

The strongly coupled behaviors between neutronics and thermal-hydraulics of liquid-fueled molten salt reactors make it difficult to evaluate system behaviors, due to the transport of precursors along moving fuel. Extending an adjoint-based method on the multiphysics approach, different assumptions on temperature dependencies of nuclear and thermophysical properties of salt are included in the local sensitivity analysis of a circulating liquid fuel system. Local sensitivity of various types of system response in steady-state is analyzed for 39 parameters including coupling models, reactor design values, and kinetic constants of delayed neutron and decay heat precursors for a simplified 1D model of molten salt fast reactor. Extended adjoint-based sensitivity analysis method for MSR is successfully validated achieving 1.38% deviation on average between a recalculation and adjoint method, comparing local sensitivities to all parameters. Also, it takes 66.3 times less in computational time compared with the recalculation method for evaluating the sensitivity of the same type of system response. The importance of all the parameters to the system response is analyzed according to the assumptions on temperature dependencies to nuclear data and salt properties. The most influencing ones are fission energy-related terms, and their importance increases when temperature dependencies are taken into account, compared with constant properties. Changes of influences on the sensitivity are investigated from the relative changes of the parameter values in various system response types, and it implies the importance to consider the multiphysics modeling on the local sensitivity analysis.