Accelerated sampling of the free gas resonance elastic scattering kernel
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accel_res_scat_v3.pdf
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Author(s)
Walsh, Jonathan Alan
Forget, Benoit Robert Yves
Smith, Kord S.
Date Issued
February 2014
Journal
Annals of Nuclear Energy
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Walsh, Jonathan A., Benoit Forget, and Kord S. Smith. “Accelerated Sampling of the Free Gas Resonance Elastic Scattering Kernel.” Annals of Nuclear Energy 69 (July 2014): 116–124. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In this work, we present the derivation and investigation of a new Doppler broadening rejection sampling approach for the exact treatment of resonance elastic scattering in Monte Carlo neutron transport codes. Implemented in OpenMC, this method correctly accounts for the energy dependence of cross sections when treating the thermal motion of target nuclei in elastic scattering events. The method is verified against both stochastic and deterministic reference results in the literature for ²³⁸U resonance scattering. Upscatter percentages and mean scattered energies calculated with the method are shown to agree well with the reference scattering kernel results. Additionally, pin cell and full core k[subscript eff] results calculated with this implementation of the exact resonance scattering kernel are shown to be in close agreement with those in the literature. The attractiveness of the method stems from its improvement upon a computationally expensive rejection sampling procedure employed by an earlier stochastic resonance scattering treatment. With no loss in accuracy, the accelerated sampling algorithm is shown to reduce overall runtime by 3–5% relative to the Doppler broadening rejection correction method for both pin cell and full core benchmark problems. This translates to a 30–40% reduction in runtime overhead.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2014.01.017
