A NOVEL APPROACH TO FIND OPTIMIZED NEUTRON ENERGY GROUP STRUCTURE IN MOX THERMAL LATTICES USING SWARM INTELLIGENCE

• Main Authors: M. AKBARI, F. KHOSHAHVAL, A. MINUCHEHR, A. ZOLFAGHARI
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2013-12-01
• Series: Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• Subjects: Energy Group Structure; Optimization; MOX Thermal Lattices; WIMS Library
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1738573315300802

Energy group structure has a significant effect on the results of multigroup transport calculations. It is known that UO2–PUO2 (MOX) is a recently developed fuel which consumes recycled plutonium. For such fuel which contains various resonant nuclides, the selection of energy group structure is more crucial comparing to the UO2 fuels. In this paper, in order to improve the accuracy of the integral results in MOX thermal lattices calculated by WIMSD-5B code, a swarm intelligence method is employed to optimize the energy group structure of WIMS library. In this process, the NJOY code system is used to generate the 69 group cross sections of WIMS code for the specified energy structure. In addition, the multiplication factor and spectral indices are compared against the results of continuous energy MCNP-4C code for evaluating the energy group structure. Calculations performed in four different types of H2O moderated UO2–PuO2 (MOX) lattices show that the optimized energy structure obtains more accurate results in comparison with the WIMS original structure.