ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON OF APOLLO3® AND TRIPOLI-4® NEUTRON NOISE SOLVERS

Abstract

Neutron noise analysis addresses the description of small time-dependent flux fluctuations in reactor cores, induced by small global or local perturbations of the macroscopic cross sections due to density fluctuations of the coolant, to vibrations of fuel elements, control rods, or structural materials. The general noise equations are obtained by assuming small perturbations around a steady-state neutron flux and by subsequently taking the Fourier transform in the frequency domain. Recently, new neutron noise solvers have been implemented in diffusion and transport theory in APOLLO3®, the multi-purpose deterministic transport code developed at CEA, and a new stochastic solver has been implemented for the neutron noise analysis in the frequency domain in the Monte Carlo code TRIPOLI-4®, also developed at CEA. In this paper, we compare the two solvers for the case of fuel pin oscillations in a simplified UOX fuel assembly, in view of proposing the examined configurations as a benchmark for neutron noise calculations.

Keywords

• neutron noise
• frequency domain
• complex statistical weights
• tripoli-4®
• apollo3®