Effects of Applying the Implicit Particle Fuel Model for Pebble-Bed Reactors

In the pebble-bed high temperature gas-cooled reactor, there exist randomly located TRISO coated fuel particles in the pebbles and randomly located pebbles in the core, which is known as the double stochastic heterogeneity. In the previous research, the regular lattice pattern was used to approximately simulate the pebble unit cells because the difficulties in modeling the randomly located TRISO geometric. This work aimed at to quantify the stochastic effect of high-temperature gas cooled pebble-bed reactor unit cells, and in view of the strong ability to carry out the accurate simulation of random media, the implicit particle fuel model of Monte Carlo method is applied to analyze to the difference between regular distribution and random distribution. Infinite multiplication factors of the pebble-bed reactor unite cells were calculated by the implicit particle fuel model and simple cube regular lattice pattern at different TRISO packing factor from 0.5%–50%. The results showed that the simple cube regular lattice pattern underestimates the infinite multiplication factors for most packing fractions, but overrates the infinite multiplication factors when the packing fraction is very low.