A 3D nodal mixed dual method for nuclear reactor kinetics with improved quasistatic model and a semi-implicit scheme to solve the precursor equations

The mixed dual nodal method MINOS is used to solve the reactor kinetics equations with improved quasistatic IQS model and the θ method is used to solve the precursor equations. The speed of calculation which is the main advantage of the MINOS method and the possibility to use the large time step for shape flux calculation permitted by the IQS method, allow us to reduce considerably the computing time. The IQS/MINOS method is implemented in CRONOS 3D reactor code. Numerical tests on different transient benchmarks show that the results obtained with the IQS/MINOS method and the direct numerical method used to solve the kinetics equations, are very close and the total computing time is largely reduced.