SPERT III E-Core critical experiment benchmarks calculation with NECP-X and KENO-VI

The Special Power Excursion Reactor Test (SPERT) III E-Core is a small experimental reactor towards experimental and theoretical investigations of kinetic and safety behavior of nuclear reactors. The SPERT III E-core model was established with a high-fidelity direct whole-core transport code NECP-X and a Monte Carlo code KENO-VI. Most of components of the reactor core were explicitly modeled in these two codes. A series of steady-state cases were calculated, ranging from 2D lattice to 3D whole core, providing the reference solutions for SPERT-III E-Core benchmarks. The complicated geometry of transient rods is modeled by the Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) method in NECP-X. Numerical results indicate that NECP-X shows the good agreement with KENO-VI for all test cases.