Benchmark study on realized random packing model for coated fuel particles of HTTR using MCNP6

Ho, H. Q.   ; Morita, Keisuke*; Honda, Yuki; Fujimoto, Nozomu*; Takada, Shoji

The Coated Fuel Particle plays an important role in the excellent safety feature of the High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor. However, the random distribution of CFPs also makes the simulation of HTGR fuel become more complicated. The Monte Carlo N-particle (MCNP) code is one of the most well-known codes for validation of nuclear systems; unfortunately, it does not provide an appropriate function to model a statistical geometry explicitly. In order to deal with the stochastic media, a utility program for the random model, namely Realized Random Packing (RRP), has been developed particularly for High Temperature engineering Test Reactor (HTTR). This utility program creates a number of random points in an annular geometry. Then, these random points will be used as the center coordinate of CFPs in the MCNP6 input file and therefore the actual random arrangement of CFPs can be simulated explicitly. First, a pin-cell calculation was carried out to validate the RRP by comparing with Statistical Geometry (STG) model of MVP code. After that, the comparison between the RRP model (MCNP) and STG model (MVP) was shown in whole core criticality calculation, not only for the annular core but also for the fully-loaded core. The comparison of numerical results showed that the RRP model and STG model differed insignificantly in the multiplication factor as expected, regardless of the pin-cell or whole core calculations. In addition, the RRP model did not make the calculation time increase a lot in comparison with the conventional regular model (uniform arrangement).