New acceleration method of source convergence for loosely coupled multi unit system by using matrix K calculation

Kuroishi, Takeshi; Nomura, Yasushi

To accelerate the slow convergence of the fission source distribution, the matrix k calculation has been developed and incorporated in the ordinary Monte Carlo method. The acceleration can be performed by the fission source correction using the eigenvector of the fission matrix, if the coupling coefficients are approximately evaluated in the middle of Monte Carlo calculation. In this paper, we propose two effective applications of the matrix k, that is, the acceleration repetition method and the source generation method. The former simply repeats the matrix k calculation, and the result for the irradiated fuel pin cell shows enough effective to accelerate the fission source on the criticality estimation. However, in some cases of the loosely coupled multi unit system, the repetition of matrix k more than twice could not be carried out to get into convergence because of many units of low source level. The latter is newly devised here to apply to such cases. The checkerboard fuel storage rack is one of the typical cases, and the calculated results show the effectiveness of this method.