Overview of the Tolerance Limit Calculations with Application to TSURFER

Hany Abdel-Khalik, Dongli Huang, Ugur Mertyurek, William Marshall and William Wieselquist
Additional contact information
Hany Abdel-Khalik: School of Nuclear Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA
Dongli Huang: School of Nuclear Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA
Ugur Mertyurek: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
William Marshall: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA
William Wieselquist: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 21, 1-37

Abstract: To establish confidence in the results of computerized physics models, a key regulatory requirement is to develop a scientifically defendable process. The methods employed for confidence, characterization, and consolidation , or C 3 , are statistically involved and are often accessible only to avid statisticians. This manuscript serves as a pedagogical presentation of the C 3 process to all stakeholders—including researchers, industrial practitioners, and regulators—to impart an intuitive understanding of the key concepts and mathematical methods entailed by C 3 . The primary focus is on calculation of tolerance limits, which is the overall goal of the C 3 process. Tolerance limits encode the confidence in the calculation results as communicated to the regulator. Understanding the C 3 process is especially critical today, as the nuclear industry is considering more innovative ways to assess new technologies, including new reactor and fuel concepts, via an integrated approach that optimally combines modeling and simulation and minimal targeted validation experiments. This manuscript employs intuitive, analytical, numerical, and visual representations to explain how tolerance limits may be calculated for a wide range of configurations, and it also describes how their values may be interpreted. Various verification tests have been developed to test the calculated tolerance limits and to help delineate their values. The manuscript demonstrates the calculation of tolerance limits for TSURFER, a computer code developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for criticality safety applications. The goal is to evaluate the tolerance limit for TSURFER-determined criticality biases to support the determination of upper, subcritical limits for regulatory purposes.

Keywords: statistical tolerance limits; Bayesian inference; aleatory and epistemic uncertainties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/21/7092/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/21/7092/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:21:p:7092-:d:668454

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().