The present article describes the preliminary design studies for PETALE (Programme d’Etude en Transmission de l’Acier Lourd et ses Eléments), an oncoming experimental program in the CROCUS reactor. Within the framework of the Venus-Eole-Proteus collaboration, PETALE continues the nuclear data validation efforts required for modeling GEN-III pressurized water reactors with heavy steel reflectors. The inelastic scattering cross sections at around 1 MeV of iron-56, as well as nickel and chromium isotopes, will be studied separately. The water reflector will be replaced successively by sheets of stainless steel alloy and pure metals—iron, nickel, and chromium. Data will be extracted from two sources: the measured neutron flux attenuation using adequate dosimetry and possibly fission chambers in the metal reflector and from the criticality effects of these reflectors. PETALE will also be used with nuclear data adjustment methods because, as a separated and elemental integral experiment, it allows the limiting of compensation effects in the nuclear data adjustments. A parametric study has been carried out with MCNPX for assessing the optimal configuration and the feasibility of the experiments. This study is the first step toward optimizing the global sensitivity of the experiments to the reactions in the energy range of interest, thus assessing the measurements’ target uncertainties and preparing further use of the program results.
This paper presents an assessment of three deterministic core simulators with the focus on the neutronic performance in steady-state calculations of small Sodium cooled Fast Reactor cores. The selected codes are DYN3D, PARCS and the novel multi-physics solver GeN-Foam. By using these codes, the multi-group diffusion solutions are obtained for the selected twenty control rod worth measurements performed during the isothermal physics tests of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF). The identical set of homogenized few-group cross sections applied in the calculations is generated with the Serpent Monte Carlo code. The numerical results are compared with each other as well as with the measured values. The obtained numerical results, such as the multiplication factors and control rod worth values, are in good agreement as compared to the experimental data. Furthermore, a comparison of the radial power distributions is presented between DYN3D, PARCS and GeN-Foam. Ultimately, the power distributions are compared to the full core Serpent solution, demonstrating an adequate performance of the selected deterministic tools. In overall, this study presents a verification and validation of the neutronic solvers applied by DYN3D, PARCS and GeN-Foam to steady-state calculations of SFR cores.
The current work presents a simplified benchmark for a pool-type Sodium Fast Reactor based on a 2D (r-z) geometry for testing tightly-coupled spatial neutron transport, thermal-hydraulics and thermal-mechanics modeling. The new benchmark is motivated by development of the multi-physics OpenFOAM-based GeN-Foam code at the Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour at the EPFL, Switzerland, and the FAST code system by the Advanced Nuclear Systems group at the Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland. Aiming at the improvement of modeling and code-to-code comparison, the benchmark could prove useful for developers of tightly-coupled multi-physics simulation tools for reactor analysis. The benchmark specification and the solutions obtained with GeN-Foam are presented and discussed in the paper.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.