Maintaining a critical spectra within Monteburns for a gas-cooled reactor array by way of control rod manipulation
| Autor: | Babatunde John Adigun, Michael L Fensin, Holly R. Trellue, Jack D. Galloway |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Physics
Fissile material 020209 energy Control rod Nuclear engineering chemistry.chemical_element 02 engineering and technology Linkage (mechanical) 01 natural sciences 010305 fluids & plasmas Power (physics) law.invention Plutonium Nuclear physics Nuclear Energy and Engineering chemistry Criticality law Position (vector) 0103 physical sciences 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Burnup |
| Zdroj: | Annals of Nuclear Energy. 96:36-60 |
| ISSN: | 0306-4549 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.anucene.2016.05.025 |
| Popis: | This burnup study examined the effect of a predicted critical control rod position on the nuclide predictability of several axial and radial locations within a 4 × 4 graphite moderated gas cooled reactor fuel cluster geometry. To achieve this, a control rod position estimator (CRPE) tool was developed within the framework of the linkage code Monteburns between the transport code MCNP and depletion code CINDER90, and four methodologies were proposed within the tool for maintaining criticality. Two of the proposed methods used an inverse multiplication approach – where the amount of fissile material in a set configuration is slowly altered until criticality is attained – in estimating the critical control rod position. Another method carried out several MCNP criticality calculations at different control rod positions, then used a linear fit to estimate the critical rod position. The final method used a second-order polynomial fit of several MCNP criticality calculations at different control rod positions to guess the critical rod position. The results showed that consistency in prediction of power densities as well as uranium and plutonium isotopics was mutual among methods within the CRPE tool that predicted critical position consistently well. While the CRPE tool is currently limited to manipulating a single control rod, future work could be geared toward implementing additional criticality search methodologies along with additional features. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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