Effect of the uniform fission source method on local power variance in full core serpent calculation

Yurii Bilodid, Jaakko Leppänen

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle in a proceedings journalScientificpeer-review

    Abstract

    One of challenges of the Monte Carlo full core simulations is to obtain acceptable statistical variance of local parameters throughout the whole reactor core at a reasonable computation cost. The statistical variance tends to be larger in low-power regions. To tackle this problem, the Uniform-Fission-Site method was implemented in Monte Carlo code MC21 and its effectiveness was demonstrated on NEA Monte Carlo performance benchmark. The very similar method is also implemented in Monte Carlo code Serpent under the name Uniform Fission Source (UFS) method. In this work the effect of UFS method implemented in Serpent is studied on the BEAVRS benchmark which is based on a real PWR core with relatively flat radial power distribution and also on 3x3 PWR mini-core simulated with thermo-hydraulic and thermo-mechanic feedbacks. It is shown that the application of the Uniform Fission Source method has no significant effect on radial power variance but equalizes axial distribution of variance of local power.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)871-878
    Number of pages8
    JournalEPJ Web of Conferences
    Volume247
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020
    MoE publication typeA4 Article in a conference publication
    EventInternational Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2020: Transition to a Scalable Nuclear Future - Cambridge, United Kingdom
    Duration: 28 Mar 20202 Apr 2020

    Funding

    This work has been funded from the McSAFE project which is receiving funding from the Euratom research and training program 20142018 under grant agreement No 755097.

    Keywords

    • Monte Carlo
    • Serpent
    • Uniform Fission Source
    • Variance reduction

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