https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124702019
ASSESSMENT OF PARALLEL SIMULATED ANNEALING PERFORMANCE WITH THE NEXUS/ANC9 CORE DESIGN CODE SYSTEM
1 Westinghouse Electric Company 1000 Westinghouse Dr, Cranberry Township, PA 16066, USA
2 Oak Ridge National Laboratory One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
ivanovbd@westinghouse.com
kropaczekdj@ornl.gov
Published online: 22 February 2021
The method of parallel simulated annealing is being considered as a loading pattern optimization method to be used within the framework of the latest Westinghouse core design code system NEXUS/ANC9. A prototype version of NEXUS/ANC9 that incorporates the parallel simulated annealing method was developed. The prototype version was evaluated in terms of robustness, performance and results. The prototype code was used to optimize LPs for several plants and cycles, including 2-loop, 3-loop and 4-loop Westinghouse plants. Different fuel assembly lattices with IFBA, WABA and Gadolinium burnable absorbers were also exercised in these cores. Different strategies were evaluated using different options in the code. Special attention was paid to the robustness and performance when different number of parallel processes were used with different size of Markov chain.
Key words: Parallel Simulated Annealing / Loading Pattern Optimization / NEXUS/ANC9
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
