Syria's Benchmark Results against Experimental Data from RSG-GAS

The qualification of an integrated set of thermal-hydraulic neutronics codes is essential for performing comprehensive research reactors safety analysis that considers the interaction of thermal-hydraulic and neutronics' processes. Thus, the ultimate task of the performed research activities in this Coordinated Research Project aimed at qualification of the thermal-hydraulic codes MERSAT, RELAP and the neutronic code MCNP for the application in design, operation and safety analysis of research reactors. For the purpose of code qualification comprehensive benchmark analysis against selected integral effect experiments have been performed. The experiments cover thermal-hydraulic, neutronic and reactor dynamic calculations (core and full reactor system calculations) for steady state and transients that cover loss of flow accidents (LOFA) and reactivity insertion accidents. The goal of the conducted benchmark analyses focuses on: – Demonstrating the application and further development of innovative reactor analysis tools in the research reactor community with the ultimate purpose of supporting the transfer of such tools to the larger research reactor community; – Validation of the applied codes against experimental data, and application of the validated codes to simulate steady state and transients covering a variety of neutronic and thermal-hydraulic conditions for various selected research reactors. – Application of the validated analysis tools in the safety analysis of RR. – The benchmark analysis has been completed by the code to code comparison for the same experimental sets in order to classify the confidence of the involved codes and identifying the user effects among the involved teams.