Impact of implicit effects on uncertainties and sensitivities of the Doppler coefficient of a LWR pin cell

¹ Paul Scherrer Institut, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
² Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS) gGmbH, Boltzmannstr. 14, 85748 Garching, Germany

^a e-mail: mathieu.hursin@psi.ch

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

In the present work, PSI and GRS sensitivity analysis (SA) and uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods, SHARK-X and XSUSA respectively, are compared for reactivity coefficient calculation; for reference the results of the TSUNAMI and SAMPLER modules of the SCALE code package are also provided. The main objective of paper is to assess the impact of the implicit effect, e.g., considering the effect of cross section perturbation on the self-shielding calculation, on the Doppler coefficient SA and UQ. Analyses are done for a Light Water Reactor (LWR) pin cell based on Phase I of the UAM LWR benchmark. The negligence of implicit effects in XSUSA and TSUNAMI leads to deviations of a few percent between the sensitivity profiles compared to SAMPLER and TSUNAMI (incl. implicit effects) except for ²³⁸U elastic scattering. The implicit effect is much larger for the SHARK-X calculations because of its coarser energy group structure between 10 eV and 10 keV compared to the applied SCALE libraries. It is concluded that the influence of the implicit effect strongly depends on the energy mesh of the nuclear data library of the neutron transport solver involved in the UQ calculations and may be magnified by the response considered.