Monte Carlo simulation of the thermal column and beam tube of the TRIGA Mark II research reactor

Abstract

The Monet Carlo simulation of the TRIGA Mark II research reactor core has been performed employing the radiation transport computer code MCNP5. The model has been confirmed experimentally in the PhD research work at the Atominstitute (ATI) of the Vienna University of Technology. The MCNP model has been extended to complete biological shielding of the reactor including the thermal column, radiographic collimator and four beam tubes. This paper presents the MCNP simulated results in the thermal column and one of the beam tubes (beam tube A) of the reactor. To validate these theoretical results, thermal neutron flux density measurements using the gold foil activation method have been performed in the thermal column and beam tube A (BT-A). In the thermal column, the theoretical and experimental results are in fairly good agreement i.e. maximum thermal flux density in the centre decreases in radial direction. Further, it is also agreed that thermal flux densities in the lower part is greater than the upper part of the thermal column. In the BT-A experiment, the thermal flux density distribution is measured using gold foil. The experimental and theoretical diffusion lengths have been determined as 10.77 cm and 9.36 cm respectively with only 13% difference, reflecting good agreement between the experimental and simulated results. To save the computational cost and to incorporate the accurate and complete information of each individual Monte Carlo MC particle tracks, the surface source writing capability of MCNP has been utilized to the TRIGA shielding model. The variance reduction techniques have been applied to improve the statistics of the problem and to save computational efforts.