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MaCaw: Domain-Decomposed Monte Carlo Neutral Particle Transport on Unstructured Mesh in MOOSE

G. Giudicelli, R. Crowder, L. Harbour, D. Gaston

Nuclear Science and Engineering / Volume 199 / Number 1S / April 2025 / Pages S397-S405

Research Article / dx.doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2332009

Received:November 22, 2023
Accepted:March 13, 2024
Published:April 30, 2025

MaCaw is a Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE)–based application that enables domain-decomposed neutral particle transport calculations in MOOSE. It leverages MOOSE’s ray-tracing module for unstructured mesh particle tracking and OpenMC for collision physics. Additionally, the OpenMC implementation of several calculation steps (e.g. initialization and normalization) needed in a Monte Carlo particle transport eigenvalue calculation were adapted for domain decomposition. This paper reports on MaCaw’s implementation and several limitations, a single verification case, and early single-node scaling studies. This paper also serves as an announcement of the public release of MaCaw on the Idaho National Laboratory GitHub at https://github.com/idaholab/macaw.