Review of kinetic modulation experiments in low power nuclear reactors

Abstract

The safety improvement of nuclear reactors requires continuous efforts in understanding the fundamental physical quantities related to the fission process. In neutronic models, the reactor dynamics is covered by the kinetic parameters to characterize the temporal behavior of the neutron population subject to perturbations. The reactor transfer function is a frequency domain analogy of this temporal description. It can be measured experimentally through transfer function analysis via noise analysis or kinetic modulation, for the study of reactor stability and kinetic parameters. This paper summarizes the experimental measurements of reactor transfer function through kinetic modulation. Extensive work have been conducted experimentally, starting from the beginning of reactor physics research. An overview is given regarding various experimental designs and conducted analyses. The concepts of the modulation system are also discussed. The current work is limited to online contents and internal archives of CEA Cadarache due to difficulties in accessing references traced back to 1950s.