Reactor physics analysis of the SPERT III E-core with Tripoli-4®

•We develop a Monte Carlo model for the SPERT III E-core.•We compare the Tripoli-4® simulation results to the experimental measurements.•Reactor physics parameters are computed for core loading, cold zero power and hot zero power operational cores.

In this paper we detail a Monte Carlo model for the SPERT III E-core and we illustrate the simulation results obtained for the reactor physics parameters (including the effective multiplication factor, the reactivity worth of the core components and the kinetics parameters) by resorting to the production code Tripoli-4®. We have considered three reactor configurations, namely, initial core loading, zero cold power and hot zero power in stationary conditions, based on the large database of available experimental measurements. This analysis is aimed at establishing a firm background for the future investigation of the time-dependent behavior of the E-core under reactivity excursions by resorting to reactor period calculations and dynamic Monte Carlo methods.