Benchmarking TRITON ORIGEN-ARP

[Maita Morales]

Hi friends,

I'm working with ORIGEN-ARP to get the neutron spectrum and residual power fuel. I create the library with TRITON and after we burn and decay with ORIGEN-ARP.

To make the validation, I have made a comparison between a burnup a depletion with TRITON and the same case with ORIGEN-ARP. The results show a bad behavior in cm-244 (more and lees a 1.5% difference), and consequently, there are differences in the neutron spectrum and power actinide results too.

I don’t know if this results are for an error our calculations or it’s a normal behavior to use two different codes (a one dimensional code and other two dimensional code). Can you say me if other colleges have some paper about benchmarking TRITON vs ORIGEN-ARP?

Beforehand thanks for your attention and best regard

[Ian Gauld]

Dear Maita

 It sounds like you are taking all the right steps to verify your library first by reproducing the TRITON results. Isotopic results, particularly for isotopes like Cm244 and Pu240 can be very sensitive to the time step used (in either the TRITON or the ORIGEN calculation) which controls the burnup points where the cross section generation/interpolation is done. Cm244 is very sensitive because of the long transmutation chain, and Pu240 because of the large changes in cross section value with burnup. As a general rule I to try to ensure that the ORIGEN calculation is within about 1% of the TRITON values for major isotopes. Differences of this size can occur due to the time step selection (smaller being more accurate). However, you should be able to match the results closer if you ensure that the exact same time steps and compositions are used in the ORIGEN calculation (number of cycles and the time steps within each cycle). In this case, you are performing the exact calculation with the same cross section data in standalone ORIGEN (ARP) as was done in TRITON. Best regards

Ian Gauld

[Maita Morales]

Dear Ian,

 

Thank you very much for your answer, it’s of great help for our team. Now, we are sure that we are doing well the work.

Congratulation for your SACLE work and your team.

Best regard

Maita Morales