[Back]

R. Khan, M. Villa, T. Stummer, H. Böck, S. Badshah:
"Perturbation Analysis of the TRIGA Mark II reactor Vienna";
Int. Journal for Nuclear Power, 58 (2013), 4; 230 - 235.

The safety design of a nuclear reactor needs to maintain the steady state operation at desired power level. The safe and reliable reactor operation demands the complete knowledge of the core multiplication and its changes during the reactor operation. Therefore it is frequently of interest to compute the changes in core multiplication caused by small disturbances in the field of reactor physics. These disturbances can be created either by geometry or composition changes of the core. Fortunately if these changes (or perturbations) are very small, one does not have to repeat the reactivity calculations. This article focuses the study of small perturbations created in the Central Irradiation Channel (CIC) of the TRIGA mark II core to investigate their reactivity influences on the core reactivity. For this purpose, 3 different kinds of perturbations are created by inserting 3 different samples in the CIC. The cylindrical void (air), heavy water (D2O) and Cadmium (Cd) samples are inserted into the CIC separately to determine their neutronics behavior along the length of the core. The Monte Carlo N-Particle radiation transport code (MCNP) is applied to simulate these perturbations in the CIC. The MCNP theoretical predictions are verified by the experiments performed on the current reactor core. The behavior of void in the whole core and its dependence on position and water fraction is also presented in this article.