High-efficiency simulation of VENUS-3 neutron-shielding problem with an automatic and enhanced hybrid Monte-Carlo-Deterministic method

Abstract

To solve the deep-penetration problem in the Monte-Carlo simulation, the classic consistent adjoint driven importance sampling (CADIS) and forward-weighted CADIS (FW-CADIS) hybrid MC-deterministic method is adopted and enhanced in this paper. An automatic hybrid MC-deterministic code, NECP-MCX, is newly developed. NECP-MCX embeds the discrete-ordinate code NECP-Hydra to automatically perform the forward and adjoint neutron-transport calculations and set up the importance parameters for the MC simulation. In massive parallel calculation for large shielding problems, huge amounts of memory are required to save detailed weight-window information. To mitigate the memory limitation, a mesh-coarsening algorithm is developed based on the contributon theory. It can be applied in the traditional Cartesian-mesh and the nested-mesh structure. NECP-MCX was applied to the VENUS-3 benchmark. The results show that NECP-MCX with the enhanced hybrid method is effective in variance reduction and memory saving for the simulation of large and complicated shielding problems on parallel computer resources.