Evaluating the Robustness of ACE-Based Pin Power Reconstruction for CANDU Application

Abstract

An Alternating-Conditional-Expectation-based pin power reconstruction methodology for CANDU reactor physics analyses has recently been developed. During the development of this methodology, the 37-pin fuel bundle was utilized. The results from that study indicate that the proposed methodology is sufficiently accurate, giving a root-mean-squared (RMS) error of approximately 0.59% for all pins and an RMS error of approximately 0.60% in predicting the maximum pin power. In the present paper, the robustness of the methodology will be evaluated against 28-pin and 43-pin fuel bundles. It will be demonstrated that similar quality in predicting the pin power distributions in these bundle designs is observed.