Benchmark Comparisons of OpenMC and DRAGON5 Codes for Calculating the Doppler Coefficient of Reactivity

The new Version VIII.0 of the ENDF/B nuclear data library (ENDL) provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the United States was used to create a data set in ACE (A Compact ENDF) format and convert them to an HDF5 format for use in code OpenMC, at different temperatures of 600 and 900 K. Because of its importance within the nuclear simulation, the NJOY2016 code was utilized to develop a set of numerical benchmarks for the Doppler temperature coefficient (DTC) of reactivity. The eigenvalues of some selected idealized light water reactor (LWR) pin cell configurations with seven different uranium fuel enrichments (0.711–5.0 wt % ^235 U) were computed using the multigroup energy OpenMC Monte Carlo code. Two fuel temperatures (FT) corresponding to the hot zero power (HZP at 600 K) and the hot full power (HFP at 900 K) conditions have been considered. These benchmarks were provided for the evaluation of the precision of light water reactor codes for computing the system eigenvalue as well as the Doppler coefficient of reactivity. The results of the calculations were compared using the Monte Carlo OpenMC with the deterministic code DRAGON5. The two codes show good agreement when compared to previous studies.