Validation of TULIP via ICSBEP Critical Benchmark

Abstract

NECP-SARAX is a neutronics code system for fast spectrum reactor developed by Nuclear Engineering Computational Physics Laboratory team of Xi'an Jiaotong University. In previous work, NECP-SARAX has shown high performance on fast spectrum reactor analysis. Recently, neutron-moderating materials are employed in advance reactors design where the pure fast spectrum is softened to intermediate and thermal energy spectrum. Due to the larger fission cross-section below the fast energy range, the volume of reactors reaching criticality can be reduced. Compared that in fast energy range, the temperature reactivity negative feedback resulting from the Doppler effect in thermal spectrum range is more significant, which is conducive to the safety and miniaturization of the reactors. To meet the design requirement of this kind of reactor, the assembly-wise neutron spectrum calculation module TULIP of NECP-SARAX has recently been extended to generate the cross sections for both the thermal and fast spectrum reactor system. Therefore, in this paper, the validation works of TULIP code have been performed. In order to systematically validate the accuracy of TULIP code, a series of benchmarks with neutron-moderating material are selected from the ICSBEP, such as HEU-MET-FAST-001-002,HEU-MET-FAST-027-001, U233-SOL-THERM-015-001. The numerical results showed that the TULIP code had accurate neutron spectrum calculation capability for the advanced nuclear reactor design.