COMPARISON OF DIRECT AND QUASI-STATIC METHODS FOR NEUTRON KINETIC CALCULATIONS WITH THE EDF RD COCAGNE CODE

摘要

Quasi-Static (QS) methods are quite popular in the reactor physics community and they exhibit two main advantages. First, these methods overcome both the limits of the Point Kinetic (PK) approach and the issues of the computational effort related to the direct discretization of the time-dependent neutron transport equation. Second, QS methods can be implemented in such a way that they can be easily coupled to very different external spatial solvers. In this paper, the results of the coupling between the QS methods developed by Politecnico di Torino and the EDF R&D core code COCAGNE are presented. The goal of these activities is to evaluate the performances of QS methods (in term of computational cost and precision) with respect to the direct kinetic solver (e.g. θ-scheme) already available in COCAGNE. Additionally, they allow to perform an extensive cross-validation of different kinetic models (QS and direct methods).