GEN-FOAM MODEL AND BENCHMARK OF DELAYED NEUTRON PRECURSOR DRIFT IN THE MOLTEN SALT REACTOR EXPERIMENT

GEN-FOAM MODEL AND BENCHMARK OF DELAYED NEUTRON PRECURSOR DRIFT IN THE MOLTEN SALT REACTOR EXPERIMENT

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The effective delayed neutron fraction is an important reactor kinetics parameter.In flowing liquid-fuel reactors, this read more differs from the delayed neutron fraction because of the emission of delayed neutrons with a lower energy spectrum than prompt and the delayed neutron precursor (DNP) drift due to the fuel movement.In general, neglecting delayed neutron precursor drift leads to an over-estimation of the effective delayed neutron fraction.Nevertheless, the capability to simulate this peculiar phenomenon is not available in most reactor physics tools.In this project, a multi-physics approach to modeling DNP drift is developed using the GeN-Foam toolkit, and it benchmarked against available experimental data from the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE).

GeN-Foam couples a neutron diffusion solver with a thermal-hydraulics solver.Additionally, a new function was added for solving adjoint multi-group diffusion eigenvalue problems and calculating effective delayed neutron fraction.For benchmarking, an R-Z model of the MSRE was developed in GeN-Foam.The porous media model was applied, and cross sections were generated using the Monte Carlo code Serpent-2 with ENDF/B-VII.1 nuclear data library.

In order to evaluate the impact of DNP drift, two steady-state conditions (stationary and flowing salt at 1200 gpm) were simulated.A reactivity change of -241 pcm was calculated using GeN-Foam for the MSRE between static and flowing fuel, which is in a good agreement with the experimental value of -212 pcm.The total effective delayed neutron fraction change was calculated to be -230 pcm click here vs.-304 pcm reported for the MSRE and analytical calculated during the experimental campaign.Three transient accidents were also analyzed.