Abstract
In a pressurized water reactor (PWR), the fuel assemblies must be reloaded after operating for one and half year, and thus the loading pattern (LP) needs to be redesigned to achieve the longest cycle length and satisfy the safety requirements. The LP design is accomplished by engineers based on their experience. Since the computer capability has been greatly improved, designing the LP by computer become possible. Our laboratory had applied Ant Colony Algorithms to automatically design the LP a couple years ago, but the time effort still need to be improved. In this research, the computational time that the LP design takes can be dramatically reduced by combining Ant Colony Algorithms and Tabu Search (TS).This research use C language to write the program and simulate the core status by SIMULATE-3 under UNIX environment. There’re two stages to design a LP. First, search a rather good fuel loading pattern using Ant Colony Algorithm and 2D SIMULATE-3 calculation. Second, adjust the loading pattern to fulfill the requirements using Tabu Search. There’re two ways to adjust the LP: one is “swap”, the other is “rotation”. The experimental results show that a loading pattern design can be accomplished automatically within a rather short time.