HEXAGONAL PWR-CORE MODELING AND SIMULATION WITH APPLICATION OF NECP-BAMBOO

School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 28 West Xianning Road, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, China

^* yunzhao@xjtu.edu.cn

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

In this paper, the modeling and simulation of the PWRs loaded with hexagonal fuel assemblies has been implemented with the NECP-Bamboo code. NECP-Bamboo, consisting of a 2D lattice code named Bamboo-Lattice and a 3D steady-state core code named Bamboo-Core, was primitively designed for the PWRs loaded with the rectangular fuel assemblies. As the capability extension for PWRs with hexagonal fuel assemblies, four aspects of improvement have been implemented in NECP-Bamboo. Firstly, the Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) has been implemented in Bamboo-Lattice for the lattice modeling. Secondly, the explicit modeling of the reflector assembly has been applied to provide more reliable few-group constants, compared with the conventional 1D model for the reflector assembly. Thirdly, the assembly-homogenization capability has been extended to the hexagonal assembly. Fourthly, the diffusion solver in Bamboo-Core based on the Variational Nodal Method (VNM) has been extended to handle hexagonal geometry. With application of the capability-extended NECP-Bamboo, the modeling and simulations for the VVER-1000 benchmark loaded with MOX fuel has been implemented. It can be observed that the numerical results provided by NECP-Bamboo can agree well with corresponding results by the Monte-Carlo code.