RETRANS, Reactivity Transients in LWR

1 - Description of program or function: RETRANS is appropriate to calculate power excursions in light water reactors initiated by reactivity insertions due to withdrawal of control elements. As in the code TWIGL, the neutron physics model is based on the time-dependent two-group neutron diffusion equations. The equation of state of the coolant is approximated by a table built into the code. RETRANS solves the heat conduction equation and calculates the heat transfer coefficient for representative fuel rods at each time-step. 2 - Method of solution: The time-dependent neutron diffusion equations are modified by an exponential transformation and solved by means of a finite difference method. There is an option accelerating the inner iterations of the difference scheme by a coarse-mesh re-balancing method. The heat balance equations of the thermo- hydraulic model are discretized and converted into a tri-diagonal system of linear equations which is solved recursively. 3 - Restrictions on the complexity of the problem: r-z-geometry, one- phase-flow