Method research and engineering application of the B10-abundance correction for PWR

In this paper, the method research and engineering application of the B10-abundance correction for PWR have been implemented. The boric acid is one of the main neutron-absorber materials, within which the B10 is the most significant isotope for absorbing the thermal neutron. Due to the depletion effect and boronation effect, the B10 abundance would variate with the time. These effects would result in the phenomenon that the calculation values of the critical boron concentrations (CBC) provided by nuclear-design code would be smaller than corresponding measurement values. Therefore, for reducing the calculation errors of CBC, the B10-abundance correction method has been proposed based on the Bamboo-C code. Applying the B10-abundance correction method, the engineering validation has been implemented, comparing the calculation values of CBC and B10 abundances with corresponding measurement values. The numerical results indicated that the proposed correction method for B10 abundance can notably improve the calculation accuracy.