On Line Measurement of Reactivity Worth of TRIGA Mark-II Research Reactor Control Rods

The reactivity worth measurement system for control rods of the TRIGA MARK-II research reactor of Bangladesh has been design and developed. The theory of the kinetic technique of measuring reactivity has been used by this measurement system. The system comprises of indigenous hardware and software for online acquisition of neutron flux signals from reactor console and then computes the reactivity worth accordingly. Here for the TRIGA MARK-II research reactor, the reactivity measurement system was implemented with a dedicated circuit assembly and a conventional personal computer. A high-level Visual Basic real-time programming has been developed for data acquisition, reactivity calculation, online display (numerically as well as graphically), saving data, etc. To measure reactivity worth of TRIGA reactor control rods the rod drop experimental technique has been adopted. The results of tests experiments, carried out with the rod drop method for measuring various reactivity worth of control rods have been presented in the paper. A comparison between this results with the results using period method and that of computation method, demonstrated that the response of this reactivity measurement system is fast enough to monitor and measure the safety-related reactivity and power excursions in the reactor.