RESONANCE SELF-SHIELDING CALCULATION FOR PLATE-TYPE FUEL ASSEMBLIES

Abstract

Owing to its ability to handle arbitrary geometry and high computation efficiency, subgroup method is a widely used resonance self-shielding method. Ordinarily, the subgroup parameters are generated from homogenous resonance integral tables, and then can be used to calculate heterogeneous problems via the equivalence theory. However, it cannot provide accurate results especially for the plate-type assemblies with strong heterogeneity. What’s more, the fuel enrichment in plate-type assemblies is relatively much higher than the common rod-type ones. As a result, the resonance interference effect in plate-type fuels is particularly intense. To solve this problem and to provide accurate effective self-shielded cross-sections for plate-type fuel assemblies, 1-D plate problems are used to generate subgroup parameters. In order to deal with resonance interference, the resonance interference factors are generated by equivalent homogenous problems solved by 0-D hyperfine group solver. To avoid the computational burden caused by too many hyperfine group calculations, the importance of resonance isotopes is calculated in advance to select important resonance isotopes. Important and non-important ones are handled by different ways respectively. JRR-3M plate-type assemblies are used to test the newly method. Numerical results show that the relative errors of effective self-shielded cross-sections are generally less than 1.5% compared with the reference.

Keywords

• plate-type assembly
• subgroup method
• resonance interference factors