Continuous-Energy Adjoint Flux and Perturbation Calculation using the Iterated Fission Probability Method in Monte Carlo Code TRIPOLI-4® and Underlying Applications

Abstract

Pile-oscillation experiments are performed in the MINERVE reactor at the CEA Cadarache to improve nuclear data accuracy. In order to precisely calculate small reactivity variations (<10 pcm) obtained in these experiments, a reference calculation need to be achieved. This calculation may be accomplished using the continuous-energy Monte Carlo code TRIPOLI-4® by using the eigenvalue difference method. This “direct” method has shown limitations in the evaluation of very small reactivity effects because it needs to reach a very small variance associated to the reactivity in both states. To answer this problem, it has been decided to implement the exact perturbation theory in TRIPOLI-4® and, consequently, to calculate a continuous-energy adjoint flux. The Iterated Fission Probability (IFP) method was chosen because it has shown great results in some other Monte Carlo codes. The IFP method uses a forward calculation to compute the adjoint flux, and consequently, it does not rely on complex code modifications but on the physical definition of the adjoint flux as a phase-space neutron importance. In the first part of this paper, the IFP method implemented in TRIPOLI-4® is described. To illustrate the effciency of the method, several adjoint fluxes are calculated and compared with their equivalent obtained by the deterministic code APOLLO-2. The new implementation can calculate angular adjoint flux. In the second part, a procedure to carry out an exact perturbation calculation is described. A single cell benchmark has been used to test the accuracy of the method, compared with the “direct” estimation of the perturbation. Once again the method based on the IFP shows good agreement for a calculation time far more inferior to the “direct” method. The main advantage of the method is that the relative accuracy of the reactivity variation does not depend on the magnitude of the variation itself, which allows us to calculate very small reactivity perturbations with high precision. Other applications of this perturbation method are presented and tested like the calculation of exact kinetic parameters (βeff, Λeff) or sensitivity parameters.