Comparison of 3-D deterministic parallel and Monte Carlo transport computations for special nuclear materials assessments

Conference · Sat Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2006

OSTI ID:22039528

Ghita, G; Sjoden, G E; Baciak, J E ^[1]

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1. Florida Inst. for Nuclear Detection and Security FINDS, Dept. of Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32606 (United States)

This paper discusses several topics related to our efforts to accomplish research leveraging 3-D radiation transport models to ultimately yield a complete mosaic of the radiation spectrum from a fissile source. Here, we effectively characterize and construct SNM neutron source terms, and demonstrate that the BUGLE-96 multigroup library is applicable to our general deterministic transport neutron detection scenarios. We also investigated our initial design of a moderated He-3 detector array. In performing our computations, we demonstrate how the PENTRAN parallel 3-D Sn code is quite efficient at parallel computation with several domain decomposition strategies, achieving a parallel (Amdahl) fraction of 0.96 on up to 16 dedicated processors while yielding our adjoint Sn transport results. Finally, we have established a procedure for analyzing He-3 response in a graded detector-moderator array, and are moving closer in our efforts to attribute a neutron spectrum from the resulting neutron responses in our graded moderator He-3 detector array, simulated entirely via computational methods for SNM sources of high interest. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22039528
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
DESIGN
DETERMINISTIC ESTIMATION
DISCRETE ORDINATE METHOD
GROUP CONSTANTS
HE-3 COUNTERS
MONTE CARLO METHOD
MULTIGROUP THEORY
NEUTRON DETECTION
NEUTRON SOURCES
NEUTRON SPECTRA
NEUTRON TRANSPORT
PARALLEL PROCESSING
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS