Pin Power Reconstruction of HANARO Fuel Assembly via Gamma Scanning and Tomography Method

Abstract

To determine the pin power distribution without disassembling, HANARO fuel assemblies are gamma-scanned and then the distribution is reconstructed tv using the tomography method. The iterative least squares method (ILSM and the wavelet singular value decomposition method (WSVD) are chosen to solve the problem. An optimal convergence criterion is used to stop the iteration algorithm to overcome the potential divergence in ILSM. WSVD gives better results than ILSM , and the average values from the two methods give the best results. The RMSE (root mean square errors) to the reference data are 5.1, 6.6, 5.0, 6.5, and 6.4% and the maximum relative errors are 10.2, 13.7, 12.2, 13.6, and 14.3%, respectively. It is found that the effect of random positions of the pins is important. Although the effect can be accommodated by the iterative calculations simulating the random positions, the use of experimental equipment with a slit covering the whole range of the assembly horizontally is recommended to obtain more accurate results. We made a new apparatus using the results of this study and are conducting an experiment in order to obtain more accurate results.