thermal hydraulic and neutronphysical performance of the two multilayer fuel assemblies was investigated with a coupling approach. The results show that the hot channel factor and the maximum cladding temperature in the thermal fuel assembly can be kept significantly below the design limit using the multilayer concept. A sufficiently large negative temperature reactivity coefficient of coolant and the breeding feature can be achieved in the fast spectrum zone with the multilayer fuel assembly design. The results obtained so far show that the multilayer concept is feasible and promising.