Direct, on-the-fly calculation of unresolved resonance region cross sections in Monte Carlo simulations
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Forget_Direct, on-the-fly.pdf
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Author(s)
Kiedrowski, Brian C.
Brown, Forrest B.
Walsh, Jonathan Alan
Forget, Benoit Robert Yves
Smith, Kord S.
Date Issued
October 2015
Journal
Proceedings of the ANS MC2015 - Joint International Conference on Mathematics and Computation (M&C), Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications (SNA) and the Monte Carlo (MC) Method
Publisher
American Nuclear Society
Citation
Walsh, Jonathan A. et al. "Direct, on-the-fly calculation of unresolved resonance region cross sections in Monte Carlo simulations." ANS MC2015 - Joint International Conference on Mathematics and Computation (M&C), Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications (SNA) and the Monte Carlo (MC) Method, 19-23 April, 2015, Nashville, Tennessee, American Nuclear Society, 2015.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The theory, implementation, and testing of a method for on-the-fly unresolved resonance region cross section calculations in continuous-energy Monte Carlo neutron transport codes are presented. With this method, each time that a cross section value is needed within the simulation, a realization of unresolved resonance parameters is generated about the desired energy and temperature-dependent
single-level Breit-Wigner resonance cross sections are computed directly via use of the analytical ψ − χ Doppler integrals. Results indicate that, in room-temperature simulations of a system that is known to be
highly sensitive to the effects of resonance structure in unresolved region cross sections, the on-the-fly treatment produces results that are in excellent agreement with those produced with the well-established
probability table method. Additionally, similar agreement is observed between results obtained from the on-the-fly and probability table methods for another intermediate spectrum system at temperatures of 293.6 K and 2500 K. With relatively tight statistical uncertainties at the ∼ 10 pcm level, all on-the-fly and probability table keff eigenvalues agree to within 2σ. Also, we use the on-the-fly approach to show that accounting for the resonance structure of competitive reaction cross sections can have non-negligible effects for intermediate/fast spectrum systems. Biases of up to 90 pcm are observed. Finally, the consequences of the on-the-fly method with respect to simulation runtime and memory requirements are
briefly discussed.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
http://www.proceedings.com/27010.html
