Neutronic optimization in high conversion Th-{sup 233}U fuel assembly with simulated annealing
- Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, Ben-Gurion Univ., POB 653, Beer Sheva 84105 (Israel)
This paper reports on fuel design optimization of a PWR operating in a self sustainable Th-{sup 233}U fuel cycle. Monte Carlo simulated annealing method was used in order to identify the fuel assembly configuration with the most attractive breeding performance. In previous studies, it was shown that breeding may be achieved by employing heterogeneous Seed-Blanket fuel geometry. The arrangement of seed and blanket pins within the assemblies may be determined by varying the designed parameters based on basic reactor physics phenomena which affect breeding. However, the amount of free parameters may still prove to be prohibitively large in order to systematically explore the design space for optimal solution. Therefore, the Monte Carlo annealing algorithm for neutronic optimization is applied in order to identify the most favorable design. The objective of simulated annealing optimization is to find a set of design parameters, which maximizes some given performance function (such as relative period of net breeding) under specified constraints (such as fuel cycle length). The first objective of the study was to demonstrate that the simulated annealing optimization algorithm will lead to the same fuel pins arrangement as was obtained in the previous studies which used only basic physics phenomena as guidance for optimization. In the second part of this work, the simulated annealing method was used to optimize fuel pins arrangement in much larger fuel assembly, where the basic physics intuition does not yield clearly optimal configuration. The simulated annealing method was found to be very efficient in selecting the optimal design in both cases. In the future, this method will be used for optimization of fuel assembly design with larger number of free parameters in order to determine the most favorable trade-off between the breeding performance and core average power density. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, Inc., 555 N. Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, Illinois 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22105672
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: PHYSOR 2012: Conference on Advances in Reactor Physics - Linking Research, Industry, and Education, Knoxville, TN (United States), 15-20 Apr 2012; Other Information: Country of input: France; 9 refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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