TOUCANS: A versatile Monte Carlo neutron transport code based on GEANT4

Abstract

This paper reports the development of TOUCANS, a new Monte Carlo neutron transport code fully written using the GEANT4 toolkit. It aims at modeling complex systems easily and rapidly, thanks to a simple key–value input file. While its main focus is the transport of low energy neutrons – below 20 MeV – using evaluated cross-section libraries, it also takes advantage of the state-of-the-art capabilities offered by GEANT4 regarding the modeled cross-sections for practically all particles at all energies. Hence it gives access to non-specialists to a wide variety of applications involving different particles, such as the simulation of compact accelerator based neutron sources (CANS) which initially motivated its development. It leverages on recent implementations performed within GEANT4 to provide both shielding calculation capabilities (using Adaptive Multilevel Splitting, which is a full y automated variance reduction technique) and criticality calculation capabilities (to estimate the keff of a multiplicative system). It also benefits from a tight coupling with CADMesh to readily import CAD models, with NCrystal to extend the support of thermal neutron transport to crystals, with FIFRELIN to increase compound nucleus de-excitation accuracy, and with FUNZ to provide to the user parametric simulation capabilities (such as multi-objective algorithms and calculation of Pareto sets). Thanks to recent improvements of the neutron physics within the GEANT4 Neutron-HP package, the TOUCANS code can be considered on-par with industrial neutron transport codes such as Tripoli-4® or MCNP in term of neutron physics accuracy. Its sources should be released soon amongst GEANT4 advanced examples.