Comparative Study of Dragon and Tripoli for a PWR Assembly

Abstract

Neutronic simulation codes are essential to understand the behaviour of nuclear reactors. These codes use deterministic or stochastic methods to solve the Boltzmann equation for the flux and effective multiplication constant. In this paper, we compare the results of the deterministic code DRAGON and the Monte Carlo code TRIPOLI for the simulation of a PWR assembly in two situations: when the control rods are out of the assembly and when they are used as a neutron absorber. We will compare the two methods and discuss the selection of adequate simulation parameters in order to obtain coherent models for the two codes. Here, we concentrate our work on the calculations of the effective multiplication factor and the scalar flux.