Publications associées à Methods and Models for the Coupled Neutronics and Thermal-Hydraulics Analysis of the CROCUS Reactor at EFPL

Neutron-Gamma Noise Measurements in a Zero-Power Reactor Using Organic Scintillators

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Noise measurements in light water reactor systems aid in generating validation data for integral point kinetic parameter predictions and generating monitoring parameters for reactor safety and safeguards. The CROCUS zero-power reactor has been used to supp ...

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Gamma-ray Spectroscopy in Low-Power Nuclear Research Reactors

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Gamma-ray spectroscopy is an effective technique for radioactive material characterization, routine inventory verification, nuclear safeguards, health physics, and source search scenarios. Gamma-ray spectrometers typically cannot be operated in the immedia ...

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Nuclear fusion presents a promising clean energy source to mitigate future energy crises, with magnetic confinement fusion well-positioned to provide a baseload scenario to power future reactors. The unmitigated power exhaust of such reactors threatens its ...

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Intra-pin Reaction Rate Measurements in the CROCUS Experimental Reactor

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In response to the need for validating high-fidelity deterministic neutronics solvers capable of providing pin-resolved neutron flux distributions, intra-pin reaction rates measurements were performed in the CROCUS experimental reactor. A specially designe ...

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Gamma noise to non-invasively monitor nuclear research reactors

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Autonomous nuclear reactor monitoring is a key aspect of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s strategy to ensure nonproliferation treaty compliance. From the rise of small modular reactor technology, decentralized nuclear reactor fleets may strain the ...

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DEMO will have a limited diagnostic set for optimization of reactor performance, and limited diagnostic coverage due to challenging reactor conditions. This poses challenges for control, especially for detachment control which is planned to be performed wi ...

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Atomic level insight into irradiation effects in nuclear fuel materials

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Microstructural evolution during in-pile irradiation, radiation damage effects and fission products behavior in UO2 nuclear fuel are key issues in understanding and for the modeling of the performance as well as safety characteristics of nuclear fuels in t ...

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Design of an Instrumented Fuel Rod for Intra-pin Neutron Flux Measurements in the CROCUS Experimental Reactor

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In response to the need for validating high-fidelity deterministic neutronics solvers capable of pin-resolved neutron flux distributions, an instrumented fuel rod was designed for the experimental reactor CROCUS, operated by EPFL’s Laboratory for Reactor P ...

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A holistic investigation of photocatalytic hydrogen generation

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Photocatalytic (PC) solar hydrogen production is a promising way to provide green hydrogen using only sunlight and abundant reactants such as water. PC approaches use catalytically active semiconductor particles suspended in liquid electrolytes. The partic ...

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Extension, validation, and optimization of Serpent/DYN3D/ATHLET code system for SFR applications

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The sequence of codes Serpent/DYN3D has been developed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and successfully applied to core static and transient analyses of sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs). The successful application of the sequence to SFRs was ...

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Metal Catalysts for the Electrochemical Reduction of CO2

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The world by and large has adopted the The Paris Agreement, which commits any signing party to cut greenhouse emissions drastically and prevent global heating above 2 °C beyond pre-industrial levels. For this ambitious goal to be met, ratifying states need ...

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Monte Carlo analysis of BWR geometries using a cycle check-up methodology

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Recent fuel anomalies at a Swiss power plant have motivated the development at PSI of the "Cycle Check-Up" (CHUP) methodology which consists in performing Monte Carlo transport calculations using nuclide compositions and thermal-hydraulic boundary conditio ...

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Integrated modelling of neon impact on JET H-mode core plasmas

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Nuclear fusion reactor plasmas will need to exhaust a significant proportion of energy flux through radiative processes, to enable acceptable divertor loads. This can be obtained by line radiation from impurities, injected from the plasma edge. There are h ...

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Analysis of the preliminary campaign for the PETALE program

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The PETALE program aims to provide new experimental data to constrain the stainless steel nuclear data. In this frame, a preliminary measurement campaign has been performed to characterize the neutron flux in key positions of the CROCUS reactor and to deve ...

EDP SCIENCES S A2023

Down-conversion of a single photon as a probe of many-body localization

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Decay of a particle into more particles is a ubiquitous phenomenon to interacting quantum systems, taking place in colliders, nuclear reactors or solids. In a nonlinear medium, even a single photon would decay by down-converting (splitting) into lower-freq ...

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Extension of the OFFBEAT fuel performance code to finite strains and validation against LOCA experiments

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The mechanical analysis of nuclear fuel behavior under base-irradiation conditions has traditionally been performed adopting the small-strain approximation. However, many cases of interest for fuel behavior involve the occurrence of large rod deformations ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2023

Extension of GeN-Foam to departure from nucleate boiling prediction and validation against the OECD/NRC PSBT benchmark

Alessandro Scolaro, Carlo Fiorina, Hao Qin, Yuhang Niu

The prediction of departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) has always been a crucial aspect of thermal-hydraulic codes for the analysis of Light Water Reactors. In this paper, GeN-Foam, a multi-physics code developed based on OpenFOAM, has been enhanced to in ...

Elsevier Science Sa2023

Full-discharge simulation and optimization with the RAPTOR code, from present tokamaks to ITER and DEMO

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Tokamak devices aim to magnetically confine a hydrogen plasma at sufficiently high pressure to achieve net energy production from nuclear fusion of light isotopes. Predictive modeling and optimization is crucial for reliable operation of tokamak reactors, ...

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