Analysis of BEAVRS Benchmark with CASMO-4E/SIMULATE-3 Code System

BEAVRS is a three-dimensional PWR benchmark for high-fidelity numerical code system verification released by the Computational Reactor Physics Group of MIT in 2013. Modeling and load-following calculations were accomplished and analyzed by using the traditional two-step reactor physics code system CASMO-4E/SIMULATE-3. The numerical results show that in hot zero power (HZP) condition, the maximum relative error for radial reaction rate compared with the detector value is -18.8%, which is similar to the Monte Carlo code MC21 (-16.1%). For the case of 38.7 MW·d/tHM and 20.3%FP, the maximum relative error is reduced to -12.9%. The maximum discrepancy of simulated boron concentration versus the measured results is less than 40 ppm in the 1st cycle, which meets the engineering requirements.