The Greedy Exhaustive Dual Binary Swap Method for Fuel Loading Optimization Using the poropy Reactor Optimization Tool

摘要

This paper presents a deterministic optimization scheme termed Greedy Exhaustive Dual Binary Swap for the optimization of nuclear reactor core loading patterns. The goal of this optimization scheme is to emulate the approach taken by an engineer when manually optimizing a reactor core loading pattern. This is to determine if this approach is able to locate high quality patterns that, due to their location in the core loading solution space, are consistently missed by standard stochastic optimization methods such as those in the simulated annealing class. This optimization study is carried out using the poropy tool to handle the reactor physics model. Optimizations of the full depletion problem result in the deterministic Dual Binary Swap optimizer locating patterns that are of higher quality than those found by the stochastic Simulated Annealing optimizer, with comparable frequency. The Dual Binary Swap optimizer is, however, found to be very dependent on the starting core configuration, and can not reliably find a high quality pattern from any given starting configuration.