About the project
Fast running and highly accurate numerical methods and codes able to predict the local safety parameters of reactor cores at steady state conditions, e.g. during the operation lifetime (BOC, EOC) or under transient situations, are urgently needed by manufacturers, utilities and regulators to optimise core designs and to assess the safety features.
Monte Carlo codes for core simulations have experienced a tremendous increase of usage in the nuclear community due to the universality and the absence of angular,energy and spatial approximations in contrast to deterministic codes and since all these codes are designed to effectively utilize massively parallel computer architectures. Exploring these features and the considerable increase of computer power allow to perform simulations never expected before. Many modern Monte Carlo codes are under development to tackle the high-fidelity core analysis and depletion simulations world-wide.
The MCSAFE project will deliver improved and validated high-fidelity numerical simulation tools that can be used by different end-users (industry, regulators, research centres, etc.) to provide reference
solutions to deterministic codes for safety demonstration. In addition, the MCSAFE tools are essential to design reactor systems with improved safety features keeping sufficient safety margins. The fact that the MCSAFE tools can be applied to different reactor types including SMR, research reactors and Gen-IV emphasizes the relevance of the project for the nuclear community. Finally, the high-fidelity tools under development will provide reference solutions for other lower-order solutions of deterministic codes for which cases no experimental data are available.
KTH is contributing to MCSAFE in the following tasks:
- Improving the stability of the MC-based full core depletion calculations
- Optimisation of MC and MC-TH criticality calculations
- Optimisation of internally coupled MC-TH codes to solve full core problems
- Variance reduction for MC codes with dynamic capability
- Parallel scalability of MC-TH codes for dynamic simulations
- Testing and verification of developed tools
Staff involved in the project:
- Jan Dufek (associate professor)
- Ignas Mickus (Phd student)