Development of an improved direct kinetic simulation capability in RMC code

Abstract

With the continuous development of supercomputing, a direct kinetic simulation based on Monte Carlo method has received more attention owing to its high fidelity. In this paper, an improved direct kinetic simulation capability is developed based on the Reactor Monte Carlo (RMC) code. Several new techniques that are different from other Monte Carlo codes have been proposed, including a new method of obtaining the neutron distribution at the initial moment, and a theoretically more accurate time-dependent tally method. The newly-developed kinetic capability was tested and verified using a point reactor benchmark and a complex three-dimensional C5G7 kinetic benchmark. The numerical results demonstrate that the relative differences of the relative power at all time points between such direct kinetic simulation capability and the reference in the C5G7 benchmark are within 5.15%.