Abstract
This study performed an investigation of neutronics simulation and analysis of core characteristic on HTR-10. HTR-10 is a pebble bed High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor, so called HTGCR. The HTR-10 was built by China and completed the first experiment of criticality in 2000. The following simulations are based on the IAEA-1382 technical report released in 2003. All the benchmark problems in this report are repeated and the results of our simulations are similar to the literature’s results. By changing the fuel design of HTR-10, it can be figured out that HTR-10 was designed as an “over-moderation” type reactor. The neutron spectrum can become hotter when the fuel design was changed into “under-moderation”. Five homogenized models are also performed to investigate the model simplification effect on the double heterogeneity of HTR-10 core in this study. They are: (1) heterogeneous model (2) homogenized TRISO particles (3) homogenized fuel zone of fuel ball (4) homogenized fuel ball (5) homogenized whole core, respectively. The results revealed that the multiplication factor decreased as more regions are homogenized. And the largest difference of multiplication factor between each model is roughly 3%. The neutron spectra of each model are similar comparing with each others. Burnup calculation using TRITON sequence of SCALE6 is also performed in this study. Apart from the limitation of burnup and online-refueling, the operation period of HTR-10 is roughly 8.62 years without changing fuel.