Semi-statistical mechanical fuel rod design

A technique to combine statistical and deterministic approaches in mechanical fuel rod analysis is described. The impact of different fuel rod input parameters on the fuel rod design parameter under consideration is identified by statistical means. It is expressed through rank correlation coefficients. These coefficients are then employed to calculate corresponding quantiles for the input parameters allowing the selection of appropriate input values from the parameter probability distributions. The quantiles are computed with the provision that the fuel rod reactions obtained with the associated input parameter combination cover the reactions in it subset of the analysed fuel rod totality. The described procedure reduces the computational costs in comparison to some pure statistical methods of fuel rod design.