Measurement of Leakage Neutron Spectra for Tungsten with D-T Neutrons and Validation of Evaluated Nuclear Data

TL;DR

This study measures leakage neutron spectra from D-T neutron irradiation of Tungsten and compares them with calculations using various nuclear data libraries to validate and improve nuclear data accuracy for reactor design.

Contribution

The paper provides experimental neutron spectra measurements and evaluates the accuracy of multiple evaluated nuclear data libraries against these measurements for Tungsten.

Findings

ADS-2.0 and ENDF/B-VII.1 libraries agree well at 60°

Discrepancies observed at 120° in elastic scattering peaks

Larger differences found with ENDF/B-VII.0, JENDL-4.0, CENDL-3.1 around 8.5-13.5 MeV

Abstract

Integral neutronics experiments have been investigated at Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMP, CAS) in order to validate evaluated nuclear data related to the design of Chinese Initiative Accelerator Driven Systems (CIADS). In present paper, the accuracy of evaluated nuclear data for Tungsten has been examined by comparing measured leakage neutron spectra with calculated ones. Leakage neutron spectra from the irradiation of D-T neutrons on Tungsten slab sample were experimentally measured at 60$^{\circ}$ and 120$^{\circ}$ by using a time-of-flight method. Theoretical calculations are carried out by Monte Carlo neutron transport code MCNP-4C with evaluated nuclear data of the ADS-2.0, ENDF/B-VII.0, ENDF/B-VII.1, JENDL-4.0 and CENDL-3.1 libraries. From the comparisons, it is found that the calculations with ADS-2.0 and ENDF/B-VII.1 give good agreements with the experiments in the whole energy regions at 60$^{\circ}$, while a large discrepancy is observed at 120$^{\circ}$ in the elastic scattering peak, caused by a slight difference in the oscillation pattern of the elastic angular distribution at angles larger than 20$^{\circ}$. However, the calculated spectra using data from ENDF/B-VII.0, JENDL-4.0 and CENDL-3.1 libraries showed larger discrepancies with the measured ones, especially around 8.5-13.5 MeV. Further studies are presented for these disagreements.