Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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On the equivalence of reaction rate in energy collapsing of fast reactor code SARAX

  • Xiao, Bowen (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Wei, Linfang (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Zheng, Youqi (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Zhang, Bin (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Wu, Hongchun (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University)
  • Received : 2019.12.31
  • Accepted : 2020.08.03
  • Published : 2021.03.25
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Abstract

Scattering resonance of medium mass nuclides leads complex spectrum in the fast reactor, which requires thousands of energy groups in the spectrum calculation. When the broad-group cross sections are collapsed, reaction rate cannot be completely conserved. To eliminate the error from energy collapsing, the Super-homogenization method in energy collapsing (ESPH) was employed in the fast reactor code SARAX. An ESPH factor was derived based on the ESPH-corrected SN transport equation. By applying the factor in problems with reflective boundary condition, both the effective multiplication factor and reaction rate were conserved. The fixed-source iteration was used to ensure the stability of ESPH iteration. However, in the energy collapsing process of SARAX, the vacuum boundary condition was adopted, which was necessary for fast reactors with strong heterogeneity. To further reduce the error caused by leakage, an additional conservation factor was proposed to correct the neutron current in energy collapsing. To evaluate the performance of ESPH with conservation factor, numerical benchmarks of fast reactors were calculated. The results of broad-group calculation agreed well with the direct full-core Monte-Carlo calculation, including the effective multiplication factor, radial power distribution, total control rod worth and sodium void worth.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported partly by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Approved Number: 11775170 and 11735011).

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