Abstract:
In the poison design scheme of dispersed particle fuel, there are situations in which TRISO fuel particles and BISO poison particles are mixed and dispersed into the SiC matrix. The common equivalent homogenization method based on the disadvantage factors has difficulty in handling the conditions where multiple types of particles coexist, while the stochastic medium neutron transport method has difficulty in dealing with large-scale calculation problems. To establish the double heterogeneity processing capability for multiple particle mixing in the fuel compact and achieve high-fidelity neutronics simulation of the whole core loaded with dispersed particle fuel, this study adds a dispersed particle fuel processing module to the deterministic high-fidelity program NECP-X. The part of resonance calculation is based on the global-local coupling calculation framework. First, one-dimensional (1D) equivalent models of plate or rod fuel elements were established through the conservation of the Dancoff factor. Then, in the equivalent model, the ultrafine group method was used to obtain the effective self-shielding cross-sections. Among them, the collision probabilities inside and between the particles and the matrix were obtained through the Hébert model. The part of transport calculation is based on the 2D/1D coupling transport method. In the radial direction, the Sanchez-Pomraning (S-P) method was incorporated into the 2D MOC (method of characteristic) calculation to account for randomly distributed particles and obtain the radial flux distribution at the particle and matrix locations. In the axial direction, the pin-based homogenization was adopted, and the particle structure was considered in the flux-weighted calculation of the homogenized cross-sections. Then, the axial flux distribution was obtained through 1D S
N calculation. Similarly, the particle structure must be considered in the calculation of the homogenization parameters in the coarse-mesh finite difference method. In addition, the iterative format of the equivalent homogenized cross-sections was modified to ensure its convergence when the particle packing fractions are greater than 0.5. Taking the Monte Carlo program with explicit particle modeling as reference, calculations were carried out for rod-type fuel pin and plate-type reactor core problems. In the rod-type single pin problem, the bias of cross-sections are less than 1.8%, and the bias of infinite multiplication factors (
kinf) are less than 200 pcm. In the plate-type full core problem, the bias of effective multiplication factors (
keff) are less than 260 pcm, and the RSE of power is within 1%. The calculation results show that the method in this paper can obtain high-precision results such as resonance self-shielding cross-sections,
keff, and power distributions. Therefore, the numerical simulation method established in this study can be used for high-fidelity neutronics calculation of the entire reactor with dispersed particle fuel.