Coupled Neutronics–Thermal-Hydraulic Simulation of BEAVRS Cycle 1 Depletion by the MCS/CTF Code System

Abstract

The coupled neutronics–thermal-hydraulic simulation of the Benchmark for Evaluation and Validation of Reactor Simulations (BEAVRS) Cycle 1 depletion has been performed by the Monte Carlo–based multiphysics coupling code system MCS/CTF. MCS/CTF is a cyclewise pi-card iteration-based inner-coupling code system that couples the subchannel thermal-hydraulic code CTF as a thermal-hydraulic solver in the Monte Carlo neutron transport code MCS. MCS has been developed by the Computational Reactor Physics and Experiment Lab group at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology for the full-core analysis of large-scale commercial light water reactors with high fidelity at the engineering level. With the high-fidelity performance of MCS, the quarter-core pinwise depletion simulation for the BEAVRS Cycle 1 benchmark has been conducted with thermal-hydraulic feedback including fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and coolant density. Moreover, the MCS internal one-dimensional thermal-hydraulic solver TH1D (MCS/TH1D) has been utilized as the reference. On one hand, the simulated results of the criticality boron concentration and axially integrated assemblywise detector signals were compared with measured data. On the other hand, the comparisons of power, fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and density are also presented in this paper.

Keywords:

• MCS/CTF
• MCS/TH1D
• BEAVRS Cycle 1
• quarter-core depletion
• neutronics–thermal-hydraulic coupling

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (NRF-2019M2D2A1A03058371).