STATISTICAL CALCULATION OF HOT CHANNEL FACTORS

It is a conventional practice in the design of nuclear reactors to introduce hot channel factors to allow for spatial variations of power generation and flow distribution. Consequently, it is not enough to be able to calculate the nominal temperature distributions of fuel element, cladding, coolant, and central fuel. Indeed,one must be able to calculate the probability that the imposed temperature or heat fluxlimits in the entire core is not exceeded. In this paper, statistical methods are used tocalculate hot channel factors for a particular case of a heterogeneous, Material Testing Reactor (MTR) and compare the results obtained from different statistical methods. Itis shown that among the statistical methods available, the semi-statistical method is themost reliable one.