The effect of the importance function resolution on the accuracy of calculating the functionals of the neutron kinetics in water critical assemblies by Monte Carlo method

Abstract

The paper considers a computational study of the importance function effect on the accuracy of calculating the effective fraction of delayed neutrons, βeff, and generation time of instantaneous neutrons using the MCU Monte Carlo code based on the example of three criticality experiments from the ICSBEP handbook. In the MCU code, the importance function has a piecewise constant form: the computational model is broken down into a finite number of registration objects, and the neutron importance is calculated in each. The obtained importance values are used then to calculate the kinetic functionals due to which the calculation accuracy for the latter depends on the resolution. Three types of the importance function spatial partition (axial, radial, combined) have been studied. The numerical simulation results have shown that the axial component of the neutron importance function in all experiments has practically no effect on the calculation accuracy for βeff and Λ: the difference between the obtained values is less than 1%. The radial component has a notable effect (of up to 15.9%) on the Λ calculation accuracy while having almost no effect on the βeff estimate. Using combined partition, as compared with radial partition, improves the calculation accuracy insignificantly (< 1%).