Development of a section generator for the TRAC-BF1-BF1 one dimensional model

This paper shows the work developed to obtain a tool which associates the Fuel Management System used in the standard in-core fuel management analysis with the TRAC-BF1 transient analysis code. Several modifications were performed in the code PETRA in order to obtain a code called PETRAC. This code computes the polynomial coefficients representing the cross sections of the different axial levels in the neutronic one dimensional model of TRC4AC-BF1 depending on voids and fuel temperature. It also computes the average number of neutrons emitted per fission and the reference fuel and moderator temperatures. The comparison of the axial power distribution, the axial void distribution and fuel temperature distribution between the three dimensional static simulator PRESTO and the one dimensional neutronic model of TRAC-BF1 shows a quite good agreement. It is also observed that in order to obtain better results in the transient analysis it would be better to perform the polynomial fitting with perturbed cases obtained with TRAC-BF1 itself. (author)