PWR core calculation based on pin-cell homogenization in three-dimensional pin-by-pin geometry

Abstract

For the pressurized water reactor two-step calculation, the traditional assembly homogenization and two-group neutron diffusion calculation have been widely used. When it comes to the core pin-by-pin simulation, many models and techniques are different and unsettled. In this paper, the homogenization methods based on the pin discontinuity factors and super homogenization factors are used to get the pin-cell homogenized parameters. The heterogeneous leakage model is applied to modify the infinite flux spectrum of the single assembly with reflective boundary condition and to determine the diffusion coefficients for the SP3 solver which is used in the core simulation. To reduce the environment effect of the single-assembly reflective boundary condition, the on-line method for the SPH factors updating is applied in this paper, and the functionalization of SPH factors based on the least-squares method will be pre-made alone with the table of the group constants. The fitting function will be used to update the thermal-group SPH factors with a whole-core pin-by-pin homogeneous solution on-line. The three-dimensional Watts Bar Nuclear Unit 1 (WBN1) problem was utilized to test the performance of pin-by-pin calculation. And numerical results have demonstrated that PWR pin-by-pin core calculation has more accurate results compared with the traditional assembly-homogenization scheme.