Browsing by Author "Conti, Andrea"

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    Impact of neutron thermal scattering laws on the burn-up analysis of Supercritical LWR's fuel assemblies
    (2011) Conti, Andrea; Lohnert, Günter (Prof., Ph.D.)
    This work is a contribution to the HPLWR2 (High Performance Light Water Reactor Phase 2), a research project having the goal to investigate the technical feasibility of the High Performance Light Water Reactor. The basic idea of the HPLWR is that of an LWR working at supercritical pressure, which would allow heating up the coolant to a temperature of about 500 °C without having phase transition and sending the coolant directly to the turbine. One issue aroused by this design, deserving to be addressed by research, is the behaviour of thermal neutrons in supercritical water. At thermal energies, the De Broglie wavelength associated with the neutron is comparable to the interatomic distances in crystals and molecules and the scattering is fully governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, according to which the geometry of the aggregates the nuclei are bound to and their intra- and intermolecular dynamics are of crucial importance. It can be shown that there is a certain mathematical relation between the Fourier-transform of the hydrogen atoms’ velocity autocorrelation function ( ) and their double-differential scattering cross section. This Fourier-transform, called “generalized frequency distribution”, can be derived from experimental measurements and, effectively, Bernnat et al. of the Institut für Kernenergetik und Energiesysteme of the University of Stuttgart derived the generalized frequency distribution for liquid water on the basis of experimental results of Page and Haywood. Unfortunately there exists no experimental facility nowadays to support a thorough work of this type on supercritical water and therefore the scattering kernel for thermal neutrons in supercritical water is unknown. In criticality calculations involving supercritical water one can turn to one of the thermal scattering kernels available nowadays for hydrogen bound to the H2O molecule: for liquid water, for vapour or considering the nuclei of hydrogen as unbound. The third, most naïve option is called the “free gas approximation”. It is the goal of this work to make an estimate of the criticality calculations’ inaccuracy due to the inadequate employed physical model and to determine which one of the available models can be the best replacement. The accuracy of criticality calculations referring to the HPLWR is a problem that had already been raised by Waata in 2006. In her Ph.D. thesis Waata reports having carried out MCNP runs referring to an HPLWR fuel element employing the free gas approximation. In her thesis Waata explicitly sifts through the factors that can affect her MCNP runs’ accuracy, but leaves the inappropriate thermal treatment completely out. In this work, the inaccuracy of the criticality calculations has been investigated carrying out sets of similar burn-up calculations differing from each other only in the applied thermal cross section sets. The widest discrepancies were detected between the results obtained applying the free gas model and those obtained applying the molecular models. This, in conjunction with the fact that the free gas model does not even keep in count the molecular structure of H2O suggest to discard it and to focus the investigation on the vapour and liquid models. Dr. J. Martí, from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain registered the generalized frequency distributions obtained from the molecular dynamics simulations of 216 molecules of H2O in 10 simulated supercritical states and published in an article (1999) the frequencies of the three characteristic distribution peaks for each simulated state, in numerical format. A confrontation with the corresponding peaks from Bernnat’s available frequency distributions for liquid water and vapour revealed the peaks of the latter to be closest to the supercritical water ones in nearly all cases. Hence the inference that thermal cross section sets for vapour are for the time being the best replacement for the missing thermal cross section sets for supercritical water.