• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.1287-1300
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• 2017

Based on the observation that ignoring the angle dependency of multigroup resonance cross sections within a fuel pellet would result in nontrivial underestimation of the spatial self-shielding of flux, a parametrized spectral superhomogenization (SPH) factor library (PSSL) method is developed as a practical means of resolving the problem. Region-wise spectral SPH factors are calculated by the normal and transport corrected SPH iterations after ultrafine group slowing down calculations over various light water reactor pin-cell configurations. The parametrization is done with fuel temperature, U-238 number density, fuel radius, moderator source represented by ${\Sigma}_{mod}V_{mod}$, and the number density ratio of resonance nuclides to that of U-238 in a form of resonance interference correction factors. The parametrization is successful in that the root mean square errors of the interpolated SPH factors over the fuel regions of various pin-cells are within 0.1%. The improvement in reactivity error of the PSSL method is shown to be superior to that by the original SPH method in that the reactivity bias of -200 pcm to -300 pcm vanishes almost completely. It is demonstrated that the environment effect takes only about 4% in the reactivity improvement so that the pin-cell based PSSL method is effective in the assembly problems.