Development of neutron transport calculation codes for 3-D hexagonal geometry, 2; Improvement and enhancement of the MINISTRI code

Sugino, Kazuteru; Takino, Kazuo 

A deterministic discrete ordinates method (SN method) transport calculation code for three-dimensional hexagonal geometry has been developed as the MINISTRI code (Ver. 7.0). MINISTRI is based on the triangle-mesh finite difference method, which can perform neutron transport calculations with high accuracy for cores of fast power reactors and assemblies of the Russian BFS critical facility. The present study has derived a proper scheme for remarkably improving the convergence of MINISTRI by investigating the issue of previous MINISTRI (Ver. 1.1), which sometimes plays a poor convergence performance in calculations for large-scale power reactor cores. The verification test of improved MINISTRI has been carried out for various cores by setting the reference result as the multi-group Monte-Carlo calculation with the same cross-sections as used in MINISTRI. As a result, it is found that the agreements are within 0.1% for eigenvalues and within 0.7% for power distributions. Thus, the satisfying accuracy of MINISTRI has been confirmed. In order to reduce the calculation time, the initial diffusion calculation scheme and the parallel processing have been implemented. As a result, the calculation time is reduced to the approximately one tenth compared with previous MINISTRI. Furthermore, adoption of the treatment of the anisotropic cell streaming effect, preparation of the perturbation calculation tool, implementation of the function for specification of the triangle-mesh-wise material and merging of the hexagonal-mesh calculation code MINIHEX have been carried out. Thus, the versatility of MINISTRI has been enhanced.