Diffusion/transport hybrd discrete method for Monte Carlo solution of the neutron transport equation

Abstract

Monte Carlo method is widely used for solving neutron transport equation. Basically Monte Carlo method treats continuous angle, space and energy. It gives very accurate solution when enough many particle histories are used, but it takes too long computation time. To reduce computation time, discrete Monte Carlo method was proposed. It is called Discrete Transport Monte Carlo (DTMC) method. It uses discrete space but continuous angle in mono energy one dimension problem and uses lump, linear-discontinuous (LLD) equation to make probabilities of leakage, scattering, and absorption. LLD may cause negative angular fluxes in highly scattering problem, so two scatter variance reduction method is applied to DTMC and shows very accurate solution in various problems. In transport Monte Carlo calculation, the particle history does not end for scattering event. So it also takes much computation time in highly scattering problem. To further reduce computation time, Discrete Diffusion Monte Carlo (DDMC) method is implemented. DDMC uses diffusion equation to make probabilities and has no scattering events. So DDMC takes very short computation time comparing with DTMC and shows very well-agreed results with cell-centered diffusion results. It is known that diffusion result may not be good in boundaries. So in hybrid method of DTMC and DDMC, boundary regions are calculated by DTMC and the other regions are calculated by DDMC. In this thesis, DTMC, DDMC and hybrid methods and their results of several problems are presented. The results show that DDMC and DTMC are well agreed with deterministic diffusion and transport results, respectively. The hybrid method shows transport-like results in problems where diffusion results are poor. The computation time of hybrid method is between DDMC and DTMC, as expected.