Differential evolution with topographical mutation applied to nuclear reactor core design

作者：Sacco Wagner F^*; Henderson Nelio

来源：Progress in Nuclear Energy, 2014, 70: 140-148.

DOI：10.1016/j.pnucene.2013.09.012

• Reactor core design optimization
• Evolutionary computation
• Differential evolution
• Mutation operator
• Topographical heuristic

The nuclear reactor core design optimization problem consists in adjusting several reactor cell parameters, such as dimensions, enrichment and materials, in order to minimize the average peak-factor in a three-enrichment-zone reactor, considering restrictions on the average thermal flux, criticality and sub-moderation. This problem is highly multimodal, requiring optimization techniques that overcome local optima, which can be done achieving a balance between the exploration of the search space and the exploitation of its most promising areas. In order to do so, we introduce a variant of the differential evolution algorithm (DE) with a new mutation operator based on a topographical heuristic introduced in the early nineties, as part of a global optimization method. The new method, called TopoMut-DE, is favorably compared against the canonical version of differential evolution, and even to state-of-the-art variants, namely Opposition-Based DE and Trigonometric-Mutation Operator DE. As the problem attacked is quite challenging, the results show the potential of TopoMut-DE to be applied to other nuclear science and engineering problems.

• 出版日期2014-1