Neutron transport in anisotropic random media. (August 2018) - Marinosci, Alessandro
Highlights: We use stochastic tessellations to model severe accidents with fuel degradation. Anisotropic Poisson tessellations can take into account material stratification. We investigate neutron transport in fuel assemblies with anisotropic disorder. Abstract: Assessing the impact of random media for eigenvalue problems plays a central role in nuclear reactor physics and criticality safety. In a recent work (Larmier et al., 2018a), we have applied a probabilistic model based on stochastic tessellations in order to describe fuel degradation following severe accidents with partial melting and re-arrangement of the resulting debris. The distribution of the multiplication factor and of the kinetics parameters as a function of the mixing statistics model and of the typical correlation length of the tessellation were examined in detail for a benchmark configuration consisting in a fuel assembly with UOX or MOX fuel pins. In this paper, we extend our previous findings by including in the stochastic tessellation model the effects of anisotropy that might result from gravity and material stratification: for this purpose, we adopt the broad class of anisotropic Poisson geometries. We discuss the behaviour of the key observables of interest for eigenvalue problems in anisotropic tessellations by revisiting the fuel assembly benchmark calculations proposed in (Larmier et al., 2018a). The effects of anisotropic random media on the multiplication factor, on the kinetics parameters and on the flux spectrum will be carefully examined.