The capabilities of BGU is acquired as a result of decades of experience in the field as well as continuous active research in collaboration with leading academic and research institutions around the world. The group is maintaining and constantly improving an extensive computational infrastructure for the analysis of nuclear reactor systems, which includes state of the art computer codes and modern nuclear data libraries. This infrastructure is used for the students’ training as a part of the nuclear energy related courses at Ben-Gurion University and for the studies aiming at the design of innovative reactors and their fuel cycles. The financial support for these activities is partially provided by the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Water Resources in addition to foreign research grants.
The group employs several senior academic staff member who conduct active research in the field of nuclear energy, including Prof. Y. Ronen and Prof. A. Galperin (emeriti), Prof. E. Shwageraus (on sabbatical in Cambridge, UK), and Prof. Itzhak Orion and Prof. E. Gilad who are responsible for the supervision of graduate students and teaching the nuclear energy and reactor design courses at Ben-Gurion University.
The computational infrastructure for the analysis of current generation and future reactors includes a number of computer codes as well as basic nuclear data libraries in various formats. The group has joined a High Performance Computing (HPC) project initiated by the Computation Center at Ben-Gurion University. Multi-processor computer cluster built as a part of this project allows performing reactor core physics simulations on multiple CPU cores simultaneously. This capability greatly reduces the simulation time, improves the calculation accuracy and opens up new opportunities for including various core physics effects that previously were impossible to account for because of the prohibitively long computation times. Currently, the group is actively working on adaptation of the existing computer codes to multiprocessing environment and developing new codes that would take full advantage of these parallel processing capabilities.
A short list of the codes used by BGU includes
- MCNP – a Monte Carlo generalized geometry particles transport code, which can be very effectively executed in parallel processing environments. This code can be universally applied to a wide range of criticality or fixed source problems. The code was developed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and acquired through Nuclear Energy Agency Databank.
- BGCore – a flexible software package for the analysis of virtually any type of reactor system. It couples MCNP code with independently developed by the group fuel depletion and decay routine as well as thermal hydraulic feedback module. Highly efficient coupling procedure, developed by the group and implemented in BGCore, reduces dramatically the computation time and allows high accuracy simulation of coupled multi-physics phenomena. The code explicitly tracks atom densities of over 1700 burnable isotopes and, thus, can also be used for the analysis of spent fuel environmental emissions.
- VSOP – a code system developed specifically for comprehensive analysis of gas cooled reactors with both, pebble bed and prismatic fuel types. The code was developed in Forschungs Zentrum Julich in Germany.
- DYN3D – a computer code for analysis of reactor core for static and dynamic simulations. DYN3D is transferred to our group within a framework of cooperation agreement between BGU and Institute for Reactor Safety at Helmholz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany.
- Serpent – a Monte Carlo neutron transport code developed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland with a number of unique innovative features which allow much faster execution times than typical for other Monte Carlo codes. Serpent was specifically designed to replace deterministic fuel lattice transport codes that are commonly used for generation of homogenized cross section libraries for 3D full core simulators.
