MPOGen: A Python package to prepare few-group homogenized cross sections for core calculations by APOLLO3®

Abstract

Since 2008, CEA has been developing a new generation of multi-purpose code called APOLLO3®. APOLLO3® integrates lattice calculation and core simulations into a single software package designed for Light Water Reactors (LWR) and Fast Reactors analysis. This paper introduces MPOGen, an object-oriented module written in Python3, developed at CEA to automatize the generation of input files for the preparation of few-group homogenized cross section libraries with the new lattice part of APOLLO3®. The module drives APOLLO3® through the computation of few-group homogenized cross sections (Schneider et al., 2016). It significantly expedites the input set-up process, resulting in substantial time savings for engineers.MPOGen still targets market of LWR, as PWR and VVER. The package supports an arbitrary number of parameter space. In this work, six parameters are used to span Cartesian and non-Cartesian grids. MPOGen also supports custom geometries generated by graphical interfaces (GUI), notably Silène and ALAMOS (Tomatis et al., 2022).