Development and verification of LOOP: A Linkage of ORIGEN2.2 and OpenMC

This work presents the development of a new burn-up code named LOOP (Linkage of ORIGEN2.2 and OpenMC) and its verification against various high burn-up benchmarks. The LOOP code links OpenMC (for static analysis of the reactor core), and ORIGEN2.2 (for time dependent fuel inventory). This code is written in Python3. LOOP uses the several functionalities of PyNE like making input for ORIGEN2.2, updating cross section library of ORIGEN2.2 calculated with the help of OpenMC, reading the output file of ORIGEN2.2 to get the burnt fuel vector etc. Using these features of PyNE makes the rest of code very simple and clean. Different calculation schemes, Explicit Euler and Standard Predictor-Corrector Approach, are employed in the code. The accuracy of the code has been checked by comparing the results of UO2 and homogeneous ThO2-UO2 pin cell high burn-up benchmarks with previously published results. The obtained results show a good agreement. The maximum absolute difference in multiplication factor between LOOP and CASMO is found to be 0.025 for UO2 pin cell and 0.015 for ThO2-UO2 pin cell benchmark. Maximum absolute difference value of multiplication factor with other codes also exhibits similar values.