burnup calculations

User Support
1

is there any way to do discontinued burnup calculations using openmc-dev v0.12 for a reactor or a fuel rod operating at full power followed by shotdown then a restart again ?

2

Yes, you can specify a different power or power density for each step during depletion. If you wanted, say, full power followed by shutdown, followed again by full power, it would look something like

op = openmc.deplete.Operator(...)

timesteps = [5.0, 1.0, 5.0]
full_power = 1000.0e6
power = [full_power, 0.0, full_power]
integrator = openmc.deplete.CECMIntegrator(
    op, timesteps, power=power, timestep_units='d'
)

In this example, the CE/CM method is used for depletion with a 5 day full power timestep, 1 day of shutdown, followed by 5 days at full power.

One thing to note is that in the current release of OpenMC, it will still run a transport calculation during a zero-power even though we know the reaction rates will be zero (because there is no power). This was recently fixed on the develop branch so that no transport calculation is run if the power is zero and will be part of the next release.

1 Like
3

thank you so much paul this is so helpful i really appreciate your support