Direct, on-the-fly calculation of unresolved resonance region cross sections in Monte Carlo simulations

• Main Authors: Kiedrowski, Brian C. (Author), Brown, Forrest B. (Author), Walsh, Jonathan Alan (Contributor), Forget, Benoit Robert Yves (Contributor), Smith, Kord S. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Nuclear Society, 2017-05-03T19:20:19Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

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.
United States. Department of Energy (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors. Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725)