A Critical Review of Homogenization Techniques in Reactor Lattices

Abstract

The determination of the shape of the neutron flux in a whole reactor is, at the time being, a much too complex problem to be treated by transport theory. Since the earlier times of reactor theory, the necessity appeared to solve the problem in two steps. First the reactor is divided into zones, each of them forming a regular lattice. In each of these zones, homogenized parameters are determined by transport theory, in order to define an equivalent smeared medium. In a second step, these parameters are introduced in a diffusion theory scheme in order to treat the reactor as a whole. This is the homogenization procedure.