Development of a continuous energy version of KENO V.a

Journal Article · Mon Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 1997 · Nuclear Technology

OSTI ID:531505

Dunn, M E; Bentley, C L; Goluoglu, S; Paschal, L S; Dodds, H L ^[1]; Petrie, L M ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States). Nuclear Engineering Dept.
2. Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)

KENO V.a is a multigroup Monte Carlo code that solves the Boltzmann transport equation and is used extensively in the nuclear criticality safety community to calculate the effective multiplication factor k{sub eff} of systems containing fissile material. Because of the smaller amount of disk storage and CPU time required in calculations, multigroup approaches have been preferred over continuous energy (point) approaches in the past to solve the transport equation. With the advent of high-performance computers, storage and CPU limitations are less restrictive, thereby making continuous energy methods viable for transport calculations. Moreover, continuous energy methods avoid many of the assumptions and approximations inherent in multigroup methods. Because a continuous energy version of KENO V.a does not exist, the objective of the work is to develop a new version of KENO V.a that utilizes continuous energy cross sections. Currently, a point cross-section library, which is based on a raw continuous energy cross-section library such as ENDF/B-V is not available for implementation in KENO V.a; however, point cross-section libraries are available for MCNP, another widely used Monte Carlo transport code. Since MCNP cross sections are based on ENDF data and are readily available, a new version of KENO V.a named PKENO V.a has been developed that performs the random walk using MCNP cross sections. To utilize point cross sections, extensive modifications have been made to KENO V.a. At this point in the research, testing of the code is underway. In particular, PKENO V.a, KENO V.a, and MCNP have been used to model nine critical experiments and one subcritical problem. The results obtained with PKENO V.a are in excellent agreement with MCNP, KENO V.a, and experiments.

• OSTI ID: 531505
• Journal Information: Nuclear Technology, Journal Name: Nuclear Technology Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 119; ISSN 0029-5450; ISSN NUTYBB
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

05 NUCLEAR FUELS
42 ENGINEERING
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
CRITICALITY
FISSILE MATERIALS
K CODES
M CODES
MONTE CARLO METHOD
MULTIGROUP THEORY
MULTIPLICATION FACTORS
NUCLEAR DATA COLLECTIONS
P CODES
SAFETY ENGINEERING