• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.54 no.2
• /
• pp.764-769
• /
• 2022

The United Arab Emirates is currently building and operating four units of the APR-1400 developed by a South Korean vendor, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). This paper attempts to perform APR-1400 reactor core analysis by using the well-known two-step method. The two-step method was applied to the APR-1400 first cycle using the open-source nodal diffusion code, KOMODO. In this study, the group constants were generated using CASMO-4 fuel transport lattice code. The simulation was performed in Hot Zero Power (HZP) at steady-state and transient conditions. Some typical parameters necessary for the Nuclear Design Report (NDR) were evaluated in this paper, such as effective neutron multiplication factor, control rod worth, and critical boron concentration for steady-state analysis. Other parameters such as reactivity insertion, power, and fuel temperature changes during the Reactivity Insertion Accident (RIA) simulation were evaluated as well. The results from KOMODO were verified using PARCS and SIMULATE-3 nodal core simulators. It was found that KOMODO gives an excellent agreement.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.51 no.1
• /
• pp.13-30
• /
• 2019

This paper presents the recent improvements in the DeCART code for HTGR analysis. A new 190-group DeCART cross-section library based on ENDF/B-VII.0 was generated using the KAERI library processing system for HTGR. Two methods for the eigen-mode adjoint flux calculation were implemented. An azimuthal angle discretization method based on the Gaussian quadrature was implemented to reduce the error from the azimuthal angle discretization. A two-level parallelization using MPI and OpenMP was adopted for massive parallel computations. A quadratic depletion solver was implemented to reduce the error involved in the Gd depletion. A module to generate equivalent group constants was implemented for the nodal codes. The capabilities of the DeCART code were improved for geometry handling including an approximate treatment of a cylindrical outer boundary, an explicit border model, the R-G-B checker-board model, and a super-cell model for a hexagonal geometry. The newly improved and implemented functionalities were verified against various numerical benchmarks such as OECD/MHTGR-350 benchmark phase III problems, two-dimensional high temperature gas cooled reactor benchmark problems derived from the MHTGR-350 reference design, and numerical benchmark problems based on the compact nuclear power source experiment by comparing the DeCART solutions with the Monte-Carlo reference solutions obtained using the McCARD code.