Fine Temperature Grid Continuous Energy Cross Section Generation for Monte Carlo Analysis of Xe-100 Design
- Idaho National Laboratory
- Idaho National Laboratory (Retired)
- X-Energy LLC
The standard “A Compact ENDF (ACE)” data libraries used by Monte Carlo based reactor physics codes calculations are provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with a temperature interval mostly of 300 K (e.g. 300 K, 600 K, 900 K) for the cross sections and between 100 K and 200 K for the thermal scattering libraries (TSL). However, some codes such as MCNP lack capability to perform on-the-fly temperature interpolation during simulation both for neutron and TSL cross-sections. To evaluate the impact related to Doppler broadening and spectrum shift associated with TSL changes, this paper explores the potential of adopting a temperature grid finer than the ones contained in the standard data libraries. A 50 K temperature grid was employed to quantify the error in neutronics calculations due to temperature grid resolution. This was achieved by comparing the results of this study (50 K temperature interval) against the results obtained with standard data libraries (>100 K temperature interval). While the adopted grid primarily relies on the ENDF/B-VII.1 library, for neutron cross-sections, it utilizes ENDF/B-VIII.0 library for TSL. The analyses confirmed that the accuracy of neutronics calculations is satisfactory when using a 50 K temperature grid. Notably, adopting a 50 K temperature grid, as opposed to standard libraries or coarser temperature grids, could lead to a difference of no more than a few hundred pcm in dk for both fresh fuel and burnt fuel. The most sensitive reaction type to the temperature grid was as expected identified as the capture cross-section of U-238.
- Research Organization:
- Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- 58
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC07-05ID14517
- OSTI ID:
- 2472892
- Report Number(s):
- INL/CON-24-78635-Rev000
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025), Denver, Colorado, 04/27/2025 - 04/30/2025
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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