Development of the versatile reactor analysis code system, MARBLE3

Yokoyama, Kenji   ; Hazama, Taira ; Taninaka, Hiroshi ; Oki, Shigeo 

The third version of the versatile reactor analysis code system, MARBLE3, has been developed. In the development of the former version of MARBLE, object-oriented scripting language Python (Python2) had been used and then the latest version of Python (Python3) was released. However, due to its backward incompatibility, MARBLE no longer worked with Python3. For this reason, MARBLE3 has been fully modified and maintained to work with Python3. In MARBLE3, newly developed analysis codes and newly proposed calculation methods were incorporated, and the user interface was extended and solvers were reimplemented for maintainability, extensibility, and flexibility. In MARBLE3, the three-dimensional hexagonal/triangular transport code MINISTRI Ver.7 (MINISTRI7) and the three-dimensional hexagonal/triangular diffusion code D-MINISTRI are available as the new analysis codes. These codes can be used in the neutronics analysis system SCHEME and the fast reactor burnup analysis system OPRHEUS, which are the subsystems of MARBLE. In addition, the user interface of CBG, a core analysis system embedded in MARBLE, was extended so that the diffusion and transport calculation solvers for the 2-dimensional RZ system of CBG can be used on SCHEME. On the other hand, MARBLE3 has extended the functionality of the burnup calculation solver so that it can use the numerical methods proposed in the papers on the improvement of the Chebyshev rational function approximation method and the minimax polynomial approximation method. From the viewpoint of maintainability, the point reactor kinetics solver POINTKINETICS, which was introduced in MARBLE2, has been newly reworked as the KINETICS solver in MARBLE3.