Sensitivity Analysis in Coupled Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Simulations

Abstract

Sensitivity analysis methods have found extensive use in nuclear criticality safety applications for understanding the impact of uncertain nuclear data on eigenvalue estimates. Significant uncertainty exists in nuclear data and nuclear physics models for photon and electron transport applications, and the goal of this work is to explore whether recently developed adjoint-based, first-order generalized perturbation theory reaction rate sensitivity methods can be extended to coupled Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations. This paper presents a rigorous theoretical derivation for this extended sensitivity analysis method, which is then implemented in a one-dimensional test Monte Carlo code. The adjoint-based sensitivity coefficients are found to agree well with reference direct perturbation and deterministic SENSMG sensitivity coefficients for a simple test problem.