Pulsed Neutron Die-Away experimental data on a system with water and different concentrations of salt, aimed at validating the thermal cross sections of salt water and the absorption in chlorine, were collected in 2022 during a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The parameter of interest is the alpha eigenvalue, but the analysis of both experimental and simulation data is complicated in the presence of a large absorber (in this case, large amounts of chlorine). The difficulty lies in isolating the mode of interest from the data, while being limited by the large stochastic noise of low-flux scenarios. Different options are tested to improve the data analysis: performing directly alpha-eigenvalue calculations in SCONE (for simulations only), Domain Mode Decomposition, aside from more standard fitting techniques.

Project lead: Valeria Raffuzzi