Neutronic simulation of a CANDU-6 reactor with heavy water-based nanofluid coolant

Abstract

In re cent years, ex tended stud ies are de vel oped for in ves ti ga tion the ef fects of us ing nanofluids in NPP as cool ant. CANDU-6 re ac tors have the po ten tial to use nanofluid coolants be cause in these re ac tors, the mod er a tor sys tem is fully in de pend ent of the pri mary heat trans port sys tem. MCNPX code has been used for mod el ling and sim u la tion of a CANDU-6 re ac tor con tain ing a nanofluid as pri mary cool ant. The vari a tion of mul ti pli ca tion fac tor and to tal neu tron flux dis tri bu tion along a fuel chan nel, next to the cen tral axis, has been in ves tigated by us ing dif fer ent nanofluids. In this anal y sis, heavy wa ter-based nanofluids con tain ing var i ous vol u met ric per cent ages of Al 2 O 3 , TiO 2 , CuO, Ti, Cu, Zr, and Si nanoparticles were used. A typ i cal CANDU-6 re ac tor was se lected as ref er ence for re ac tor core mod el ling. The re sults of the neutronic anal y sis show that Al 2 O 3 nanofluids with 1% vol u met ric per cent age are the most suit able cool ant for CANDU-6 re ac tors which can in crease the cool ant heat trans fer co ef fi cient and con se quently en hance the plant ef fi ciency.

Verification and application of SuperMC3.3 to lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactor

“…In LFR de sign, a higher k eff cor re sponds to a lower power grade of Pu en rich ment in the fuel, which in di cates greater econ omy in fuel load ing [26]. The k eff per for mance is af fected (more or less) by frac tions of key nuclides in the core re gion [27]. Some stud ies have in ves ti gated the re la tion ship be tween k eff and 208 Pb [25,26] in cool ant.…”