Unfolding of the neutron spectrum in a nuclear reactor using genetic algorithms method

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present the results of the neutron spectrum unfolding using a high-performance code that we have developed, which is based on genetic algorithm. This paper presents the methodology used for neutron spectrum unfolding and describes the general architecture of our developed code. It also includes results of neutron spectrum unfolding in the case of the ARC-700 reactor using our genetic algorithm-based code and using an iterative method. In order to evaluate and validate our code, a comparison between reference values and results obtained using the iterative and genetic algorithm methods was presented. The comparison is performed both at the spectra as well as at the reproduced activation scale. This comparison shows a very good agreement between the results obtained using our code and the reference values and also shows a clear distinction of the genetic algorithm method compared with the iterative method. This validation shows that our code can be successfully used for neutron spectra unfolding in nuclear reactors using the activation detectors approach.