Improvement of the Neutron Flux Calculations in Thick Shield by Conditional Monte Carlo and Deterministic Methods

Abstract

In practice, the estimation of the flux obtained by Fredholm integral equation needs a truncation of the Neuman series. The order N of the truncation must be large in order to get a good estimation. But a large N induces a very large computation time. So the conditional Monte Carlo method is used to reduce time without affecting the estimation quality. In a previous works, in order to have rapid convergence of calculations it was considered only weakly diffusing media so that has permitted to truncate the Neuman series after an order of 20 terms. But in the most practical shields, such as water, graphite and beryllium the scattering probability is high and if we truncate the series at 20 terms we get bad estimation of flux, so it becomes useful to use high orders in order to have good estimation.

We suggest two simple techniques based on the conditional Monte Carlo. We have proposed a simple density of sampling the steps for the random walk. Also a modified stretching factor density depending on a biasing parameter which affects the sample vector by stretching or shrinking the original random walk in order to have a chain that ends at a given point of interest. Also we obtained a simple empirical formula which gives the neutron flux for a medium characterized by only their scattering probabilities. The results are compared to the exact analytic solution, we have got a good agreement of results with a good acceleration of convergence calculations.

KEYWORDS:

• Monte Carlo method
• shielding
• efficiency
• standard deviation
• biasing parameter
• scattering
• neutron flux
• Neuman series
• analytical solution
• importance sampling
• accuracy
• evaluations