Neutron inverse kinetics via Gaussian Processes

The paper introduces the application of Gaussian Processes (GPs) to determine the subcriticality level in accelerator-driven systems (ADSs) through the interpretation of pulsed experiment data. ADSs have peculiar kinetic properties due to their special core design. For this reason, classical – inversion techniques based on point kinetic (PK) generally fail to generate an accurate estimate of reactor subcriticality. Similarly to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Gaussian Processes can be successfully trained to learn the underlying inverse neutron kinetic model and, as such, they are not limited to the model choice. Importantly, GPs are strongly rooted into the Bayes’ theorem which makes them a powerful tool for statistical inference. Here, GPs have been designed and trained on a set of kinetics models (e.g. point kinetics and multi-point kinetics) for homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. The results presented in the paper show that GPs are very efficient and accurate in predicting the reactivity for ADS-like systems. The variance computed via GPs may provide an indication on how to generate additional data as function of the desired accuracy.

► A novel technique for the interpretation of experiments in ADS is presented.
► The technique is based on Bayesian regression, implemented via Gaussian Processes.
► GPs overcome the limits of classical methods, based on PK approximation.
► Results compares GPs and ANN performance, underlining similarities and differences.