Neutronic simulation of a pebble bed reactor considering its double heterogeneous nature

Abstract In pebble bed reactors, the core is filled with thousands of graphite and fuel pebbles. Fuel pebbles in these reactors consist of TRISO particles, which are embedded in a graphite matrix stochastically. The reactor core is also stochastically filled with pebbles. These two stochastic geometries comprise the so-called double heterogeneous nature of this type of reactor. In this paper, a pebble bed reactor, the HTR-10, is used to demonstrate a treatment of this double heterogeneity using the MCNP5 Monte Carlo code and MATLAB programming. In this technique, TRISO particles are modeled in a pebble using the expanded FILL and LATTICE features of MCNP5. MATLAB is used to generate random numbers which represent the location of pebbles in the core. Centers of pebbles are generated stochastically and uniformly and then transferred into the MCNP5 input file as the centers of spherical surfaces. In this model, there is no approximation to the actual geometry. In other words, the double heterogeneous nature is preserved while truncating neither the pebbles in the core nor the particles in the pebble matrix. Finally, to validate the model, benchmark problems of IAEA are used. Very good agreement with experimental results is observed.