Masters Theses
Keywords and Phrases
Criticality; Nuclear; Optimization; PSO; Nuclear physics and radiation
Abstract
“Critical experiments are used by nuclear data evaluators and criticality safety engineers to validate nuclear data and computational methods. Many of these experiments are designed to maximize the sensitivity to a certain nuclide-reaction pair in an energy range of interest. Traditionally, a parameter sweep is conducted over a set of experimental variables to find a configuration that is critical and maximally sensitive. As additional variables are added, the total number of configurations increases exponentially and quickly becomes prohibitively computationally expensive to calculate, especially using Monte Carlo methods.
This work presents the development of a particle swarm optimization algorithm to design these experiments in a more computationally efficient manner. The algorithm is then demonstrated by performing a two-dimensional and three-dimensional optimization of a uranium-molybdenum and plutonium-molybdenum critical experiment, respectively.
The two-dimensional and three-dimensional optimizations on average performed 35x and 3277x faster than the parameter sweep method, respectively. This corresponds to a 5.6 day and 2,314 day reduction in computation time”--Abstract, page iii.
Advisor(s)
Alajo, Ayodeji Babatunde
Committee Member(s)
Alam, Syed B.
Thompson, Nicholas
Department(s)
Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science
Degree Name
M.S. in Nuclear Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Publication Date
Spring 2022
Pagination
x, 85 pages
Note about bibliography
Includes bibliographic references (pages 82-84).
Rights
© 2022 Cole Michael Kostelac, All rights reserved.
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
File Type
text
Language
English
Thesis Number
T 12117
Recommended Citation
Kostelac, Cole Michael, "Particle swarm optimization for critical experiment design" (2022). Masters Theses. 8088.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/masters_theses/8088
Comments
This work was supported in part by the DOE Nuclear Criticality Safety Program, funded and managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration for the Department of Energy.