Determination of reactivity and source intensity based on the maximum likelihood method

Nishihara, Kenji  ; Iwanaga, Kohei; Yamane, Tsuyoshi; Okajima, Shigeaki  

During the experiments using the critical assembly such that reactivity is added to the stationary state and the core shifts to the other stationary state, the neutron flux transitionally changes after some change of the reactivity or source. Inverse kinetics method (IK method) can generally adopted as the technique of obtaining the reactivity and/or source by analyzing the neutron flux. However, the conventional analysis method was not able to obtain the solution with the maximum likelihood considering the error of the measured neutron flux and to estimate the error of the solution. In the present research, by adopting the maximum likelihood methodology to the problem, developed is the technique to obtain the reactivity and source intensity with maximum likelihood and the errors of them. Moreover, the technique is applied to the rod drops experiment in FCA, and the validity of a technique is checked.