Coarse mesh finite difference formulation for accelerated Monte Carlo eigenvalue calculation

Abstract

An efficient Monte Carlo (MC) eigenvalue calculation method for source convergence acceleration and stabilization is developed by employing the Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (CMFD) formulation. The detailed methods for constructing the CMFD system using proper MC tallies are devised such that the coarse mesh homogenization parameters are dynamically produced. These involve the schemes for tally accumulation and periodic reset of the CMFD system. The method for feedback which is to adjust the MC fission source distribution (FSD) using the CMFD global solution is then introduced through a weight adjustment scheme. The CMFD accelerated MC (CMFD-MC) calculation is examined first for a simple one-dimensional multigroup problem to investigate the effectiveness of the accelerated fission source convergence process and also to analyze the sensitivity of the CMFD-MC solutions on the size of coarse meshes and on the number of CMFD energy groups. The performance of CMFD acceleration is then assessed for a set of two-dimensional and three-dimensional multigroup (3D) pressurized water reactor core problems. It is demonstrated that very rapid convergence of the MC FSD is possible with the CMFD formulation in that a sufficiently converged MC FSD can be obtained within 20 cycles even for large three-dimensional problems which would require more than 600 inactive cycles with the standard MC fission source iteration scheme. It is also shown that the optional application of the CMFD formulation in the active cycles can stabilize FSDs such that the real-to-apparent variance ratio of the local tallies can be reduced. However, due to the reduced importance of the variance bias in fine local tallies of 3D MC eigenvalue problems, the effectiveness of CMFD in tally stabilization turns out to be not so great.