Feasibility analysis of the Sanchez-Pomraning method to treat the particle size distribution in particle-dispersed fuel

Abstract

The non-uniform size of particles appears in the particle-dispersed fuel generally, but this phenomenon is usually neglected. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of the Sanchez-Pomraning method to solve the particle size distribution problem in particle-dispersed fuel. The Pu-rich agglomerate phenomenon in the MOX fuel and manufacturing tolerance in the Fully Ceramic Microencapsulated (FCM) fuel are calculated by ALPHA-DH code, which implements the Sanchez-Pomraning method based on the MOC transport calculation and improved subgroup resonance calculation. Numerical results show that the Sanchez-Pomraning method has the capability to treat the particle size distribution effect accurately, where the differences between the Sanchez-Pomraning method and the Monte Carlo method are generally lower than 160 pcm. For the Pu-rich agglomerate phenomenon, the results show that ignoring the Pu-rich agglomerate effect introduces the reactivity difference of around 600 pcm, and ignoring the size distribution of the Pu agglomerate will cause the reactivity of up to 200 pcm in the extra-high or extra-low Pu enrichment. The more discrete size distribution and the smaller Pu-spots, the more significant influence will occur in the MOX fuel. For the FCM fuel, the influence brought by the TRISO particle size distribution can be ignored when only TRISO particles are filled. However, ignoring the size distribution when TRISO particles and poison particles are both added into the FCM fuel introduces the differences reaching 600–1000 pcm. These results demonstrate the importance of considering the particle size distribution for analyzing the MOX fuel and FCM fuel in practice. And the Sanchez-Pomraning method is reliable to analyze the effect of particle size distribution.