ACCELERATION OF MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMISATION CALCULATIONS FOR NUCLEAR BURNUP STUDIES USING INTRA-OPTIMISATION OBJECTIVE EXPANSION

Abstract

The optimisation of fuel assembly designs and core reload patterns has been of interest for several decades. It is found that objective functions calculated through burnup dominate the simulation time in such studies, increasing computation time by orders of magnitude, and thus bottlenecking the execution time. This study considers the effect of expanding the objective search space into burnup-dependent objective functions mid-optimisation, and evaluating the detriment to the optimisation results and benefit to execution time.