Speakers
Description
The power spectrum measurements are key elements to estimate the power spectral density of a fission reactor used in production. At CABRI institute, a research reactor used to simulate a sudden and instantaneous increase in power, known as a power transient, SPESI team developed a dating portable instrumentation named X-MODE to perform this kind of data acquisitions and analysis. The materials have been shared all over the world at different places where nuclear fission reactors require power profiling.
The CABRI experimental reactor, located at the Cadarache nuclear research center, southern France, has been successfully operated during the last 30 years, enlightening the knowledge of FBR and LWR fuel behavior during Reactivity Insertion Accident (RIA) and Loss Of Coolant Accident (LOCA). Since 2003 a whole facility renewal program have been commissioned for the need of the CABRI International Program (CIP), focused on the control of major gaseous neutron absorber He3, in the core geometry.
The CABRI team worked to modernize the X-MODE instrumentations due to electronic components, computer, and software obsolescence. The new SCHMITT system dedicated to replace X-MODE is based on CAEN R7771 neutron pulse train recorder to digitalize data from the sensors. In parallel, the software in charge of data acquisitions, calculations, and post processing have been fully re-written, including plenty of new features, as advanced inline computations, segmented storage, and graphs.
The paper describes the complete development of the SCHMITT instrumentation, which has been modernized by integrating modern materials. The software part has been re-implemented in an object-oriented approach and based on Qt framework for enhanced code portability. The usage of open-source components have been generalized, such as Linux operating system, the standard shared libraries dedicated for computing purposes as Boost, FFTw3, and Eigen3, the high performance time series database InfluxDB, and the Grafana analytics visualization tools. All these modern standard software technologies will allow porting and integrate other instrumentations used at CABRI in the future.
The new SCHMITT instrumentation has been successfully completed and is ready for a future qualification and usages. Current developments aim at including support for advanced nuclear data post-processing.
