A STUDY OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A FAST-NEUTRON HODOSCOPE SYSTEM
Abstract
A Fast-neutron hodoscope is a fuel-motion diagnostic neutron-detecting system used to record and process fuel motion data collected during a simulated hypothetical reactor transient experiment. The resulting data help to resolve many key reactor safety-related issues and to provide information useful to fast-reactor fuel designs. The degree of accuracy of these data relies on the hodoscope performance. The ANISN/RESPONSE system is a proposed mathematical method to predict some key parameters of the hodoscope performance: such as (1) signal-to-background ratio (S/B); and (2) the signal perturbation ((delta)S/S) due to fuel-mass redistribution. Two calibration experiments associated with the PARKA facility and the TREAT facility were simulated by the ANISN/RESPONSE system. The calculated results give good agreement with the experimental data, providing that the neutron cross sections are accurately processed throughout the whole energy range. A series of ANISN/RESPONSE calculations was carried out to predict the hodoscope performance for the future TREAT-UPGRADE experiments. These calculations will be used as an aid in experiment design and to provide information which will lead to corrections to the hodoscope data for neutron transport effects, thereby increasing the accuracy of fuel-mass displacement.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Nuclear physics
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