Argonne National Laboratory

Nuclear Science and Engineering

RCT

A utility program that facilitates pin level power and depletion tracking
  1. Coding Language and Computing Platforms
    Fortran source code for Linux and Macintosh.
  2. Description of Purpose
    RCT is a follow on utility program for the REBUS fuel cycle analysis code and the built in DIF3D code. Both DIF3D and REBUS software verification must be completed previous to the present RCT work. REBUS has been maintained by Argonne since the early 1960s to support its reactor design mission. RCT was added to the ARC software system in 1993 and was specifically built to carry out fuel pin analysis for ongoing EBR-II measurements.

    In the EBR-II calculation process, each cycle (operational period within which no fuel shuffling was performed) is modeled as a single step REBUS fuel cycle calculation. REBUS obtains the average flux in each region and thus obtains the average transmutation of a given region (or mesh) over the cycle. RCT takes the assembly and pin design information as its input. The DIF3D-Nodal or DIF3D-VARIANT flux solutions are used to construct a low order spatial flux interpolation scheme in each DIF3D region (or mesh). RCT performs the depletion on the coefficients of the spatial flux interpolation scheme in each DIF3D mesh and imposes that the integral preserves the average reaction rate performance produced originally by REBUS for each DIF3D mesh. RCT stores the isotopic densities and power history in the same low order spatial interpolation scheme in binary interface files which are needed as the input (BOC) to RCT and are produced as the output (EOC). These can be interpolated to produce pin level quantities. Since REBUS can model the explicit fuel cycle of a given reactor, one should understand that for any given cycle, all previous cycles must be solved in order to obtain the solution for the desired cycle. Thus for each cycle, REBUS is used to obtain the EOC state followed by RCT to obtain the EOC pin level state.

    RCT can only model full core, 60 degree periodic, and 120 degree periodic hexagonal reactor geometries. Further, because the fabrication of the fuel assemblies is known for EBR-II, RCT was not built to be used on the equilibrium capability of REBUS nor work with the external fuel cycle capabilities of REBUS. Only the non-equilibrium REBUS capability with inputted compositions for every depleting region is usable with RCT.
  3. Typical Running Time
    All of the provided test cases run REBUS first which take several minutes to complete on modern workstations. The RCT calculations were completed in under a minute. The combined test suite requires less than 15 minutes on a modern workstation. RCT is a serial code that does not contain any parallelism or threading.
  4. References
    1. W. S. Yang, ​“RCT - A Code to Reconstruct Pin Power and Burnup Characteristics from Nodal Calculations in Hexagonal Geometry,” ANL-IFR-192, April 1993.
    2. R. D. McKnight, ​“Validation of the Rebus-3/RCT Methodologies for EBR-II Core-Follow Analysis,” Argonne National Laboratory Report, ANL-IFR-153, September 1991.
  5. Primary Author
    W. S. Yang, University of Michigan
  6. Materials Available
    The source code and compilation instructions are provided. Precompiled executables for Linux and Macintosh are also included. The source code and executables for all utility programs associated with the Argonne Reactor Code system are also included. Documentation on all solvers in DIF3D and REBUS is provided along with all of the verification test cases for DIF3D, REBUS, and RCT. Contact nera-​software@​anl.​gov for licensing and distribution information.
  7. Sponsor
    U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy