Multi-regional delta-tracking method for neutron transport tracking in Monte Carlo criticality calculation

Abstract

The Monte Carlo method has been widely used as a standard method to perform neutron transport simulations in reactor physics. In conventional Monte Carlo codes corresponding to the neutron transport tracking with ray-tracing method, the distances to material boundaries must be computed frequently when the neutron changes its kinetic energy or moving into new material regions to determine the neutron transport length. However, if the neutron's mean free path length, to some extent, is greater than the macro size of the model, a huge amount of distances need to be computed. As a result, the computational efficiency of the neutron transport tracking will be degraded. An improved multi-regional delta-tracking method based on domain decomposition was introduced to solve this problem, in which the original heterogeneous model would be decomposed into many sub-regions and each sub-region was tracked using a local delta-tracking method. Consequently, the computational efficiency of the neutron transport tracking can be improved theoretically without the unnecessary distance calculations. The improved multi-regional delta-tracking method was incorporated into the MOSRT system, which is a multi-objective modeling and simulation platform for radiation transport system. Finally, the method was validated using the criticality benchmarks and its accuracy and efficiency were demonstrated in Monte Carlo criticality calculation. The results indicated that the new method was consistent with the conventional methods, but with a more competitive run-time performance.