Design of a fuel recharge for a BWR using advanced optimization systems

The fuel recharge design for a BWR reactor it was carried out, which includes the design of four fuel cells to form an assembly, the accommodation design of fresh and partially consumed assemblies and the control bars pattern design to use along an operation cycle. The three stages were approached as optimization problems using different computational tools, each one of those includes an objective function to measure quantitatively the evolution of the different candidate solutions. With the tool used in the fuel cells design that makes use of the tabu search technique its were obtained cells that showed to be lightly more reactive that other similar taken as reference. With the four designed cells it was formed a fuel assembly that turn out to have an average enrichment lightly smaller to the one of another assembly similar taken as reference. In the recharge pattern design it was used another optimization tool, also based on tabu search to obtain the accommodation of 108 fresh fuels and 336 partially consumed, fulfilling the conditions imposed to operate with the core strategies with control cells (CCC) and of low leakage. A Haling calculation reported that with the obtained accommodation it was achievement to increase in 8% the cycle length with regard to the one obtained using a similar reference pattern. In the design of the control bars patterns it was used a tool based on the use of the genetic algorithms to obtain the placement patterns of the control bars along an operation cycle. The search tool only uses the bars of the A2 sequence and it makes use of the 1/8 symmetry of the core, with that the number of used control bars it decreases at 5. Also the use of control bars in intermediate positions is also avoided. With the obtained patterns a cycle length is obtained that is lightly bigger to the reported value in a Haling calculation. (Author)