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Accelerating Monte Carlo Shielding Calculations in TRIPOLI-4 with a Deterministic Adjoint Flux

M. Nowak, D. Mancusi, D. Sciannandrone, E. Masiello, H. Louvin, E. Dumonteil

Nuclear Science and Engineering / Volume 193 / Number 9 / September 2019 / Pages 966-981

Technical Paper / dx.doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1578568

Received:October 11, 2018
Accepted:February 1, 2019
Published:August 13, 2019

In radiation protection studies, the goal is to estimate the response of a detector exposed to a strongly attenuated radiation field. Monte Carlo (MC) particle transport codes give the possibility to efficiently solve for such responses using several variance-reduction (VR) methods that help allocating more CPU time to the simulation of highly contributing histories. The TRIPOLI-4® MC particle transport code offers two main methods, the exponential transform and adaptive multilevel splitting (AMS), which rely on the definition of a suitable importance map. In this paper, we present an implementation of a generalized Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology for TRIPOLI-4. The implementation relies on coupling with the IDT code, a deterministic solver for the Boltzmann adjoint transport equation, for the generation of importance maps. We study the performance of both VR methods present in TRIPOLI-4 in this setting. In particular, to our knowledge, this is the first time that a CADIS-like methodology has been applied to AMS.