An effective initial particle sampling technique for Monte Carlo reactor transient simulations

Abstract

We propose a technique to effectively sample initial neutron and delayed neutron precursor particles for Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of typical off-critical reactor transients. The technique can be seen as an improvement, or alternative, to the existing ones. Similar to some existing techniques, the proposed sampling technique uses the standard MC criticality calculation. However, different from the others, the technique effectively produces uniform-weight particles around user-specified target sizes. The technique is implemented into the open-source Python-based MC code MC/DC and verified against an infinite homogeneous 361-group medium problem and the 3D C5G7-TD benchmark model.