• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.12
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• pp.4518-4526
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• 2023

NECP-SARAX is a neutronics analysis code system for advanced reactor developed by Nuclear Engineering Computational Physics Laboratory of Xi'an Jiaotong University. In past few years, improvements have been implemented in TULIP code which is the cross-section generation module of NECP-SARAX, including the treatment of resonance interface, considering the self-shielding effect in non-resonance energy range, hyperfine group method and nuclear library with thermal scattering law. Previous studies show that NECP-SARAX has high performance in both fast and thermal spectrum system analysis. The accuracy of TULIP code in fast and thermal spectrum system analysis is demonstrated preliminarily. However, a systematic verification and validation is still necessary. In order to validate the applicability of TULIP code for full energy range, 147 fast spectrum critical experiment benchmarks and 170 thermal spectrum critical experiment benchmarks were selected from ICSBEP and used for analysis. The keff bias between TULIP code and reference value is less than 300 pcm for all fast spectrum benchmarks. And that bias keeps within 200 pcm for thermal spectrum benchmarks with neutron-moderating materials such as polyethylene, beryllium oxide, etc. The numerical results indicate that TULIP code has good performance for the analysis of fast and thermal spectrum system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.8
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• pp.1871-1885
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• 2019

The deterministic MOC code STREAM of the Computational Reactor Physics and Experiment (CORE) laboratory of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), was initially designed for the calculation of pressurized water reactor two- and three-dimensional assemblies and cores. Since fast reactors play an important role in the generation-IV concept, it was decided that the code should be upgraded for the analysis of fast neutron spectrum reactors. This paper presents a coupled code - TULIP/STREAM, developed for the fast reactor assembly and core calculations. The TULIP code produces self-shielded multi-group cross-sections using a one-dimensional cylindrical model. The generated cross-section library is used in the STREAM code which solves eigenvalue problems for a two-dimensional assembly and a multi-assembly whole reactor core. Multiplication factors and steady-state power distributions were compared with the reference solutions obtained by the continuous energy Monte-Carlo code MCS. With the developed code, a sensitivity study of the number of energy groups, the order of anisotropic P_N scattering, and the multi-group cross-section generation model was performed on the k_eff and power distribution. The 2D core simulation calculations show that the TULIP/STREAM code gives a k_eff error smaller than 200 pcm and the root mean square errors of the pin-wise power distributions within 2%.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.1789-1803
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• 2022

RAST-F is a new full-core analysis code based on the two-step approach that couples a multi-group cross-section generation Monte-Carlo code MCS and a multi-group nodal diffusion solver. To demonstrate the feasibility of using MCS/RAST-F for fast reactor analysis, this paper presents the coupled nodal code verification results for the MET-1000 and CAR-3600 benchmark cores. Three different multi-group cross-section calculation schemes are employed to improve the agreement between the nodal and reference solutions. The reference solution is obtained by the MCS code using continuous-energy nuclear data. Additionally, the MCS/RAST-F nodal solution is verified with results based on cross-section generated by collision probability code TULIP. A good agreement between MCS/RAST-F and reference solution is observed with less than 120 pcm discrepancy in k_eff and less than 1.2% root-mean-square error in power distribution. This study confirms the two-step approach MCS/RAST-F as a reliable tool for the three-dimensional simulation of reactor cores with fast spectrum.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.2019-2028
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• 2024

Advanced nuclear reactors, especially the newly developed small and micro-reactors have complex neutron spectrum, which makes the deterministic reactor core calculations sensitive to the energy group structure of few-group cross-sections. To avoid significantly increasing the cost of energy discretization in the core calculation, two energy group structures with 31 groups and 33 groups were adopted for typical thermal and fast reactor cores, respectively. Then, an adaptive scheme of group division for reactor cores with a medium neutron spectrum was proposed. The works were based on the full spectrum nuclear reactor analysis code SARAX/TULIP. An equivalent one-dimensional model of the core was proposed to capture the key neutron spectrum features of the reactor core. Such features were used to adaptively determine a few-group structure for the following reactor core calculations. Then, the neutron spectrum in different zones with more details was calculated. With this spectrum, the cross-sections were condensed into the determined energy groups. Three tests based on different neutron spectrum were calculated to verify the schemes. The results show that using the adaptive energy group division scheme, the following core calculation can meet the accuracy requirement of different reactors with different neutron spectra.