Patent ID: 7574337

Claim:
A method of determining a fresh fuel bundle design for a core of a nuclear reactor, comprising: defining a plurality of inputs including user-defined target conditions for evaluating fuel rod type configurations of one or more reference fresh fuel bundle designs for each of N bundle groups; generating a response surface based on making single fuel rod-type exchanges in each (i,j) rod location of each bundle of a given reference bundle design being evaluated for each of the N bundle groups, the response surface including a plurality of transfer functions; iterating a search algorithm to evaluate a given combination of multiple fuel rod type exchanges made simultaneously across each of the N bundle groups using the generated response surface to generate candidate fresh fuel bundle design solutions and determine an accepted fresh fuel bundle design for each of the N bundle groups that satisfies the user-defined target conditions; and outputting data related to the accepted fresh fuel bundle design that satisfies the user-defined target conditions for each of the N bundle groups for display to a user, wherein generating the response surface includes perturbing a given reference bundle design for each of the N bundle groups by making a single fuel rod exchange at each (i,j) location of a given bundle in accordance with the given reference bundle design for each of the N bundle groups, wherein each of a plurality of fuel rod types stored in a fuel rod types database is selected to replace a given rod in each (i,j) location in a given bundle so as to generate a plurality of perturbed bundle designs for each of the N bundle groups, performing a bundle simulation of each of the bundles of the perturbed design to generate corresponding bundle simulation outputs, performing a core simulation of a virtual core loaded with the perturbed bundles of the perturbed design to generate core simulation outputs, and storing the bundle simulation outputs and core simulation outputs as data sets of the response surface, each data set of the response surface including a local response generated in accordance with a bundle simulation of a given perturbed bundle design due to the single fuel rod exchange and a global response generated in accordance with a core simulation of the perturbed bundle run through the bundle simulation.