Serpent/SUBCHANFLOW pin-by-pin coupled transient calculations for the SPERT-IIIE hot full power tests
Diego Ferraro, Manuel García, Ville Valtavirta, Uwe Imke, Riku Tuominen, Jaakko Leppänen, Víctor Hugo Sánchez-Espinoza
Abstract
The development of highly accurate methodologies in reactor physics requires as mandatory step a proper comparison with experimental data for relevant configurations. In this work, transient high-fidelity calculations using a recently developed coupled scheme between the Serpent 2 Monte Carlo transport code and the SUBCHANFLOW subchannnel thermalhydraulic code are done for selected reactivity insertion experiments from the SPERT-IIIE reactor. A graded approach is developed, where global and detailed results are obtained and compared with available experimental data. A good agreement is found for this novel approach, thus providing an initial step towards the validation of the tool within a configuration and operational conditions comparable to a PWR.