Involutes of a circle enjoy a very niche application in the nuclear engineering as they are a chosen shape of the fuel plates in a number of high flux reactors. This is because they allow for the construction of the cylindrical cores with a uniform width coolant channels between curved fuel plates. In this work we add the support for the involute-based geometries into SCONE. In contrast to prior attempts, which selected to add involutes as another surface type, we implemented them as a special type of lattice which allows for much faster cell searches. In addition, we proposed a new approach to calculate the nearest distance to an intersection with an involute based on the equation for the phase in the polar coordinates. We compared our methods with the implementation available in Serpent 2.1.32 to show that the combination of these two algorithmic choices allows for significant improvement in run time.

Project team: Mikolaj Kowalski (CEA), Congjin Ding (Cambridge) and Eugene Shwageraus