Notice of Energy R&D Project

This is a research project involving the development of a computational methodology to predict the global neutron scalar flux and thermal power profiles throughout a nuclear reactor. This methodology is based on the utilization of high order polynomials within a Monte Carlo algorithm to accelerate Monte Carlo fission source iterations for loosely coupled reactor systems. Preliminary work has demonstrated the feasibility of using high order polynomials to estimate spatially and angularly varying quantities such as the scalar flux distribution within a lattice or the interface current distribution on a boundary. This work has also led to a second approach based on imbedding this methodology into a response matrix formalism, allowing one in principle to estimate high order response matrices that could be used to estimate global flux and power distributions with improved accuracy and efficiency compared with conventional Monte Carlo methods. These methods should improve the convergence of Monte Carlo fission source iterations for loosely coupled systems