METHODOLOGY FOR HIGH-FIDELITY DETERMINISTIC MODELLING OF SWISS LWR FUEL ASSEMBLIES

Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Thermal-Hydraulics, Paul Scherrer Institut. Forschungsstrasse 111, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland.

alvaro.bernal@psi.ch
marco.pecchia@psi.ch
dimitri-alexandre.rochman@psi.ch
alexander.vasiliev@psi.ch
hakim.ferroukhi@psi.ch

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to perform pin-by-pin calculations of Swiss LWR fuel assemblies with neutron transport deterministic methods. At Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), LWR calculations are performed with the core management system CMSYS, which is based on the Studsvik suite of codes. CMSYS includes models for all the Swiss reactors validated against a database of experimental information. Moreover, PSI has improved the pin power calculations by developing models of Swiss fuel assemblies for the Monte Carlo code MCNP, with the isotopic compositions obtained from the In-Core Fuel Management data of the Studsvik suite of codes, by using the SNF code. A step forward is to use a neutron code based on fast deterministic neutron transport methods. The method used in this work is based on a planar Method of Characteristics in which the axial coupling is solved by 1D SP3 method. The neutron code used is nTRACER. Thus, the methodology of this work develops nTRACER models of Swiss PWR fuel assemblies, in which the fuel of each pin and axial level is modelled with the isotopic composition obtained from SNF. This methodology was applied to 2D and 3D calculations of a Swiss PWR fuel assembly. However, this method has two main limitations. First, the cross sections libraries of nTRACER lack some of the isotopes obtained by SNF. Fortunately, this work proves that the missing isotopes do not have a strong effect on k_eff and the power distribution. Second, the 3D models require high computational memory resources, that is, more than 260 Gb. Thus, the nTRACER code was modified, so now it uses only 8 Gb, without any loss of accuracy. Finally, the k_eff and power results are compared with Monte Carlo calculations obtained by Serpent.