Effects of fuel particle size distributions on neutron transport in stochastic media

• Effects of fuel particle size distributions on neutron transport are evaluated.
• Neutron channeling is identified as the fundamental reason for the effects.
• The effects are noticeable at low packing and low optical thickness systems.
• Unit cells of realistic reactor designs are studied for different size particles.
• Fuel particle size distribution effects are not negligible in realistic designs.

This paper presents a study of the fuel particle size distribution effects on neutron transport in three-dimensional stochastic media. Particle fuel is used in gas-cooled nuclear reactor designs and innovative light water reactor designs loaded with accident tolerant fuel. Due to the design requirements and fuel fabrication limits, the size of fuel particles may not be perfectly constant but instead follows a certain distribution. This brings a fundamental question to the radiation transport computation community: how does the fuel particle size distribution affect the neutron transport in particle fuel systems? To answer this question, size distribution effects and their physical interpretations are investigated by performing a series of neutron transport simulations at different fuel particle size distributions. An eigenvalue problem is simulated in a cylindrical container consisting of fissile fuel particles with five different size distributions: constant, uniform, power, exponential and Gaussian. A total of 15 parametric cases are constructed by altering the fissile particle volume packing fraction and its optical thickness, but keeping the mean chord length of the spherical fuel particle the same at different size distributions. The tallied effective multiplication factor (keff) and the spatial distribution of fission power density along axial and radial directions are compared between different size distributions. At low packing fraction and low optical thickness, the size distribution shows a noticeable effect on neutron transport. As high as 1.00% relative difference in keff and ∼1.50% relative difference in peak fission power density are observed. As the packing fraction and optical thickness increase, the effect gradually dissipates. Neutron channeling between fuel particles is identified as the effect most responsible for the different neutronic results. Different size distributions result in the difference in the average number of fuel particles and their average size. As a result, different degrees of neutron channeling are produced. The size effect in realistic reactor unit cells is also studied and, from the predicted values of infinite multiplication factors, it is concluded that the fuel particle size distribution effects are not negligible.