A HIGH-FIDELITY SIMULATION OF THE C5G7 BENCHMARK BY USING THE PARALLEL ENTER CODE

Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry, China Academy of Engineering Physics Mianyang, Sichuan 621900, China

ruanzhenglin@gmail.com
guohaib@foxmail.com

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

In simulation of advanced nuclear reactors, requirements like high precision, high efficiency and convenient to multi-physics coupling are putting forward. The deterministic transport method has the advantage of high efficiency, capable of obtaining detailed flux distribution and efficient in multi-physics coupling, but its accuracy is limited by the homogenized reaction cross-section data and core modelling exactness. The traditional two-steps homogenization strategy may introduce substantial deviation during the assembly calculation. It is possible to conduct a whole core deterministic transport simulation pin-by-pin to achieve higher accuracy, which eliminates the assembly homogenization process. The C5G7 benchmarks were proposed to test the ability of a modern deterministic transport code in analyzing whole core reactor problems without spatial homogenization. Different deterministic code that developed by different methods were applied to the benchmark simulation and some of them solved the benchmark accurately. However, there still exist some drawbacks in the given calculation processes which carried out by some other deterministic transport codes and we could find that the fuel pin cell in the assembly were not exactly geometrically modelled owing to the limit of the code. Consequently, the calculation precision could be improved by utilizing a high-fidelity geometry modelling. In this paper, the C5G7 benchmarks with different control rod position and different configuration were calculated by the finite element S_N neutron transport code ENTER [1], and the results were presented after massively parallel computation on TIANHE-II supercomputer. By introducing a large scale high-fidelity unstructured meshes, high fidelity distributions of power and neutron flux were gained and compared with the results from other codes, excellent consistency were observed. To sum up, the ENTER code can meet those new requirements in simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and more works and researches will be implemented for a further improvement.