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The FRED code is an in-house tool developed at the Paul Scherrer Institut for the so-called 1.5-D nuclear fuel performance analysis. In order to extend its field of application, this code has been re-implemented as a class of the OpenFOAM numerical library. A first objective of this re-implementation is to provide this tool with the parallel scalability necessary for fullcore analyses. In addition, the use of OpenFOAM as base library allows for a straightforward interface with the standard OpenFOAM CFD solvers, as well as with the several OpenFOAMbased applications developed by the nuclear engineering community. In this paper, the newly developed FRED-based OpenFOAM class has been integrated in the GeN-Foam multi-physics code mainly developed at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at the Paul Scherrer Institut. The paper presents the details of both the re-implementation of the FRED code and of its integration in GeN-Foam. The performances and parallel scalability of the tool are preliminary investigated and an example of application is provided by performing a full-core multiphysics analysis of the European Sodium Fast Reactor. INTRODUCTION In recent years there have been rapid advances in the field of multi-physics numerical simulation for nuclear reactors. In ∗Address all correspondence to this author. particular a trend is observed in the creation of new solvers and in the re-implementation of legacy solvers using modern numerical libraries for the general solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) on general geometries and unstructured meshes. Example of these activities are the Moose project [1] and the several activities dedicated to the use and development of OpenFOAM [2] based solvers [3]. An important example of legacy codes that would benefit from a re-implementation based on modern libraries is that of fuel performance codes. These codes are normally based on specific methodologies that make difficult their parallelization and coupling with other codes. In addition, most of these codes were not conceived for parallel calculation. Re-implementing these tools in a modern library would address these problems by providing proper parallelization and streamlined coupling with other ”physics”. This re-implementation is however non-trivial due to the peculiar 1.5-D representation of fuel rods, which challenges the application of standard 3-D PDE solvers. The laboratory for reactor physics and system behavior at the EPFL and PSI has been developing since a few years a multiphysics solver named GeN-Foam [4–7] and based on OpenFOAM. OpenFOAM is distributed as a CFD toolbox but it is built as a general object-oriented library for the finite-volume discretization and parallel solution of PDEs. In this work, the in-house PSI fuel performance code FRED [8] has been reimplemented as an OpenFOAM class and coupled to the GeN1 Copyright c © 2018 by ASME Foam multi-physics solver. The paper describes the details of this re-implementation, especially for what concerns the strategy for maintaining a 1.5-D description of single rods, as well as for properly employing the OpenFOAM general parallelization framework for this specific type of methodology. The work is performed in the framework of the ESFRSMART Euratom project and aims at supporting its modeling activities by providing a novel tool based on modern computational methodologies and that would supplement available legacy codes in the modeling of complex phenomena that challenge their applicability.

Creation of an OpenFOAM Fuel Performance Class Based on FRED and Integration Into the GeN-Foam Multi-Physics Code