CONTINUOUS ENERGY COMET SOLUTION TO A SMALL MODULAR ADVANCED HIGH-TEMPERATURE REACTOR BENCHMARK PROBLEM (SmAHTR)

Georgia Institute of Technology 770 State Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

^* Corresponding author
farzad@gatech.edu
dingkang.zhang@gatech.edu

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

The continuous energy coarse mesh transport (COMET) method is a hybrid stochasticdeterministic solver that provides transport solutions to heterogeneous reactor cores. In this paper, COMET is tested against continuous energy Monte Carlo in solving the recently developed stylized Small Modular Advanced High-Temperature Reactor (SmAHTR) Benchmark Problems based on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory pre-conceptual design (core configurations). These problems are well-suited to test the performance of advanced neutronics tools because of their unique neutronics characteristics such as the multiple heterogeneities. The COMET solutions for the three benchmark problems were found to agree very well with the continuous energy Monte Carlo reference solutions. The discrepancy in the core eigenvalue (k-eff) varied from 40 pcm to 51 pcm. The average and maximum relative differences in the pin fission densities were in the range of 0.20% to 0.21% and 0.77% to 0.94%, respectively. It was also found that COMET was more than 2,000 times fast than MCNP. It can be concluded that COMET can model the SmAHTR core configuration with high fidelity and significantly high computational efficiency.