Dancoff Corrections

If the lumps, rods, or plates containing the resonance material are arranged in a lattice or stack, it is likely that a neutron starting from one lump could pass through the matrix material and react with the fuel in another lump. Such an event is equivalent to never having escaped from the first lump at all; therefore, the escape cross section is reduced. This is called a Dancoff correction, and several options are available in TRANSX:

Cylinder by the Bell approximation,

C=\frac{1}{1+\lambda}~~;

Cylinder in an hexagonal lattice by the Sauer approximation,

C=\frac{{\rm e}^{-\tau\lambda}}{1+(1-\tau)\lambda}~~;

where

\tau=\left( .9523\sqrt{1+\frac{V_M}{V_M+V_C}}-1\right) \frac{\sqrt{1+V_C}}{V_M}-.12\left(1+\frac{1}{2} \sqrt{\frac{V_C}{1+V_C}}\right)~~,

Cylinder in a square lattice by the Sauer approximation,

C=\frac{{\rm e}^{-\tau\lambda}}{1+(1-\tau)\lambda}~~;

where

\tau=\left( .8862\sqrt{1+\frac{V_M}{V_M+V_C}}-1\right) \frac{\sqrt{1+V_C}}{V_M}-.08\left(1+\frac{1}{2} \sqrt{\frac{V_C}{1+V_C}}\right)~~,

Slab cell by the Bell approximation,

C=\frac{0.5}{1+\lambda_R}+\frac{0.5}{1+\lambda_L}~~;

and

Slab cell by E$_3$ collision probabilities,

C={\rm E}_3(\lambda_R)+{\rm E}_3(\lambda_L)~~.

In these expressions, $\lambda$ stands for the optical path in the moderator region, $\overline{\ell}_m\sigma_m$, $\lambda_L$ and $\lambda_R$ are the optical paths to the left and right from the region containing material $i$ to the next slab containing the same material, $V_M$ and $V_C$ are the ratios of the moderator volume and clad volume to the fuel volume, and E$_3$ is the third-order elliptic integral. In all the cases, the Dancoff correction results in an escape cross section of

\sigma^i_{xg}=\frac{1}{N_i\overline{\ell}}\, \frac{b_1(1-C)}{1+(b_2-1)C}~~,

where $b_1$ and $b_2$ are called Bell corrections (appropriate values are 1.09 for slabs and 1.35 for cylinders). When $b_1{=}b_2$, the constant is usually called $A$, the Levine factor. TRANSX provides for the automatic calculation of fuel and moderator mean chords and homogenized moderator cross sections, given the volumes and compositions of the various regions of a cell. Examples are given later in this report.

TRANSX HyperText Manual
TRANSX HyperText Help Package
T-2 Nuclear Information Service