WCITBUR - a coupling between cell and reactor calculations for fuel burnup analysis

Reactor fuel burn-up calculations are of fundamental importance in the design and operation of nuclear reactors. A great difficulty in these calculations is to consider properly the nuclear constants, that is, cross sections and decay data, in each burn-up time step. In this paper it is presented an automated computational system for fuel burn-up evaluation, where a cell and a reactor calculation codes are coupled. The coupling between the cell and the reactor calculations was automated using a computational system. For each time step and for every reactor region a fuel burn-up calculation is performed at the cell level, macroscopic cross sections are generated at the end of the time step and passed on to the reactor code. These cross sections are used for the neutron flux calculation and, consequently, the power generated and the fuel burn-up rates in each fuel region are obtained. This scheme is repeated as many times as necessary. The system was tested with a burn-up benchmark obtained from the literature and preliminary results are presented. (author)