Multifidelity Surrogate Modeling of Depressurized Loss of Forced Cooling in High-temperature Gas Reactors

TL;DR

This paper evaluates multifidelity machine learning models to efficiently predict critical transient behaviors in high-temperature gas reactors, reducing computational costs while maintaining accuracy.

Contribution

It systematically compares various multifidelity surrogate modeling approaches for nuclear reactor transient prediction, highlighting the effectiveness of Gaussian processes and neural networks.

Findings

Multifidelity Gaussian processes showed robust performance across configurations.

Neural networks achieved similar accuracy with faster training.

Two-fidelity models often matched or exceeded three-fidelity models in accuracy.

Abstract

High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are widely used to analyze nuclear reactor transients, but are computationally expensive when exploring large parameter spaces. Multifidelity surrogate models offer an approach to reduce cost by combining information from simulations of varying resolution. In this work, several multifidelity machine learning methods were evaluated for predicting the time to onset of natural circulation (ONC) and the temperature after ONC for a high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR) depressurized loss of forced cooling transient. A CFD model was developed in Ansys Fluent to generate 1000 simulation samples at each fidelity level, with low and medium-fidelity datasets produced by systematically coarsening the high-fidelity mesh. Multiple surrogate approaches were investigated, including multifidelity Gaussian processes and several neural network architectures, and validated on analytical benchmark functions before application to the ONC dataset. The results show that performance depends strongly on the informativeness of the input variables and the relationship between fidelity levels. Models trained using dominant inputs identified through prior sensitivity analysis consistently outperformed models trained on the full input set. The low- and high-fidelity pairing produced stronger performance than configurations involving medium-fidelity data, and two-fidelity configurations generally matched or exceeded three-fidelity counterparts at equivalent computational cost. Among the methods evaluated, multifidelity GP provided the most robust performance across input configurations, achieving excellent metrics for both time to ONC and temperature after ONC, while neural network approaches achieved comparable accuracy with substantially lower training times.