Benchmark for evaluation and validation of reactor simulations (BEAVRS)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 (United States)
Advances in parallel computing have made possible the development of high-fidelity tools for the design and analysis of nuclear reactor cores, and such tools require extensive verification and validation. This paper introduces BEAVRS, a new multi-cycle full-core Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) depletion benchmark based on two operational cycles of a commercial nuclear power plant that provides a detailed description of fuel assemblies, burnable absorbers, in-core fission detectors, core loading patterns, and numerous in-vessel components. This benchmark enables analysts to develop extremely detailed reactor core models that can be used for testing and validation of coupled neutron transport, thermal-hydraulics, and fuel isotopic depletion. The benchmark also provides measured reactor data for Hot Zero Power (HZP) physics tests, boron letdown curves, and three-dimensional in-core flux maps from fifty-eight instrumented assemblies. Initial comparisons between calculations performed with MIT's OpenMC Monte Carlo neutron transport code and measured cycle 1 HZP test data are presented, and these results display an average deviation of approximately 100 pcm for the various critical configurations and control rod worth measurements. Computed HZP radial fission detector flux maps also agree reasonably well with the available measured data. All results indicate that this benchmark will be extremely useful in validation of coupled-physics codes and uncertainty quantification of in-core physics computational predictions. The detailed BEAVRS specification and its associated data package is hosted online at the MIT Computational Reactor Physics Group web site (http://crpg.mit.edu/), where future revisions and refinements to the benchmark specification will be made publicly available. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22212933
- 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; 13 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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Related Subjects
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
BENCHMARKS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
CONFIGURATION
CONTROL ROD WORTHS
FUEL ASSEMBLIES
MONTE CARLO METHOD
NEUTRON FLUX
NEUTRON TRANSPORT
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
PWR TYPE REACTORS
REACTOR CORES
SIMULATION
THERMAL HYDRAULICS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
VALIDATION