An efficient calculation method for particle transport problems based on neural network

Abstract

Monte Carlo (MC) method is a powerful tool for solving particle transport problems. However, it is extremely time-consuming to obtain results that meet the specified statistical error requirements, especially for large-scale refined models. This paper focuses on improving the computational efficiency of neutron transport simulations. Specifically, this study presents a novel method of efficiently calculating neutron fixed source problems, which has many applications. This type of particle transport problem aims at obtaining a fixed target tally corresponding to different source distributions for fixed geometry and material. First, an efficient simulation is achieved by treating the source distribution as the input to a neural network, with the estimated target tally as the output. This neural network is trained with data from MC simulations of diverse source distributions, ensuring its reusability. Second, since the data acquisition is time consuming, the importance principle of MC method is utilized to efficiently generate training data. This method has been tested on several benchmark models. The relative errors resulting from neural networks are less than 5% and the times needed to obtain these results are negligible compared with those for original Monte Carlo simulations. In conclusion, in this work we propose a method to train neural networks, with MC simulation results containing importance data and we also use this network to accelerate the computation of neutron fixed source problems.