On the use of different variance reduction techniques within MCNP to calculate the flux on the concrete walls of a pressurized water reactor

Mariya Brovchenko (1) , Léa Tillard (1) , Kenneth William Burn (2) , Bertrand Cochet (1) , A. Jinaphanh (1)

1 IRSN/PSN-EXP/SNC/LN - Laboratoire de Neutronique
2 ENEA - Agenzia Nazionale per le nuove Tecnologie, l’energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile = Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development

Monte-Carlo particle transport codes are commonly used as reference calculation schemes to simulate large systems such as Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR). In particular, the calculation of ex-core flux-related quantities often requires the use of variance reduction techniques, which themselves rely on pre-calculated importance maps. This work proposes a comparison of the performances associated with the use of different weight maps produced by methods based either on Monte-Carlo codes or on deterministic codes, applied to detectors placed in the concrete wall of a PWR. Also, the data published in this paper are public and open data, so that interested researchers can use these published results for benchmark purposes.

Mots clés: neutronics; variance reduction; benchmark; reactor shielding; Monte-carlo methods

Domaines: Physique Nucléaire Expérimentale [nucl-ex]; Physique mathématique [math-ph]

Mariya Brovchenko, Léa Tillard, Kenneth William Burn, Bertrand Cochet, A. Jinaphanh. On the use of different variance reduction techniques within MCNP to calculate the flux on the concrete walls of a pressurized water reactor. International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2019), American Nuclear Society (ANS), Aug 2019, Portland (OR), United States. pp.Pages 104-119. ⟨hal-04513231⟩