Experimental validation of the new code package APOLLO3-SFR against ZPPR-10A experiment for critical and voided configurations

B. Roque (1) , A. Rizzo (1) , V. Pascal (1) , P. Archier (1)

1 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)

In order to accurately compute the ASTRID4$^{th}$ generation Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR) prototype neutronic parameters, a new APOLLO3® deterministic code is under development at CEA. It will be part of the APOLLO3-SFR package (set of nuclear data, solvers from the code, calculation schemes) dedicated to fast reactor studies. In this paper, an experimental validation of this package is carried out with both ECCO and TDT-generated cross-sections libraries provided from ERANOS2 and APOLLO3-SFR respectively. To do so, experiments realized in the ZPPR reactor, dedicated to large sodium fast breeder reactors are reproduced according to the corresponding benchmark available in the IRPhE database. The new INCA neutronic interface, also developed at CEA, was used to easily process the whole calculation from ZPPR geometry description of the experiments to APOLLO3® computations. The results show satisfactory agreements for the critical model and sodium void effect experiments computed with the ECCO cross-section library and the TDT-generated one.

Keywords: Fast critical assembly neutronic calculations; Experimental validation; Sodium void effect; APOLLO3®; ASTRID

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Nuclear Theory [nucl-th]

B. Roque, A. Rizzo, V. Pascal, P. Archier. Experimental validation of the new code package APOLLO3-SFR against ZPPR-10A experiment for critical and voided configurations. PHYSOR 2016 - International Conference on the Advances in Reactor Physics Unifying Theory and Experiments in the 21st Century, May 2016, Sun Valley, United States. ⟨hal-02442242⟩