Comparison of SERPENT and CASMO-5M for pressurized water reactors models
- Paul Scherrer Institut, Nukleare Energie und Sicherheit PSI, Villigen, 5232 (Switzerland)
The objective of this work is to perform a preliminary assessment of the capability of SERPENT to generate cross sections for a PWR Beginning-of-Life (BOL) isothermal mini-core by comparing a SERPENT/PARCS solution with the results obtained using a CASMO-5M/PARCS approach. The PARCS code is used instead of the usual SIMULATE-3 to analyze the Swiss Reactors, because interfaces with PARCS already exist to obtain neutronic data from SERPENT. For the PWR configurations, the differences between CASMO-5M and SERPENT solutions are within 200 pcm at the assembly level and thus rather small when considering the deterministic transport method (energy/angular/space discretization) in CASMO-5M versus the stochastic treatment of SERPENT, the statistical uncertainties in the Monte-Carlo approach as well as the eventual differences in nuclear data used by both codes. At the 2D mini-core level, no major difference is observed when comparing PARCS run with CASMO-5M versus SERPENT cross sections. For the generation of kinetic parameters, non trivial differences are observed due both to the methods and the data used. For the relatively limited number of configurations considered, it is hard to make any definitive statement on the benefits of using Monte Carlo codes in terms of nuclear data generation. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22212818
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: M and C 2013: 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, Sun Valley, ID (United States), 5-9 May 2013; Other Information: Country of input: France; 10 refs.; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering - M and C 2013| 3016 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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