Nuclear Techniques ›› 2017, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (4): 40503-040503.

• NUCLEAR PHYSICS, INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH •

On-the-fly Doppler broadening method based on piecewise Gauss quadrature for generating neutron cross section

CHEN Rui1,2, HAO Lijuan1, SONG Jing1, WU Bin1, HE Peng1

1. 1 Key Laboratory of Neutronics and Radiation Safety, Institute of Nuclear Energy Safety Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China;
2 University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China
• Received:2016-12-08 Revised:2016-12-26 Online:2017-04-10 Published:2017-04-07
• Supported by:

Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.11305203, No.11405204)

Abstract:

Background: As temperatures are constantly changing in nuclear reactor operation, on-the-fly Doppler broadening methods are commonly adopted for generating nuclear cross section for various temperatures in transport simulation. Among the existing methods, the SIGMA1 approach is exact but inefficient due to involving of error function and Taylor series expansion. Purpose: In this paper, we proposed a piecewise Gauss quadrature method for on-the-fly Doppler broadening based on SuperMC to improve efficiency with given accuracy. Methods: According to the cross section features of different energy regions, Gauss-Legendre quadrature was used in low-energy region, while the Gauss-Hermite quadrature used in high-energy region. Results: The comparison of typical nuclides cross section and benchmarking with Godiva and Doppler coefficient of reactivity were presented in detail, which indicated that the new method could generate neutron cross section rapidly and precisely at various temperatures. Compared with SIGMA1 method, the proposed method improved the computing efficiency by an average of 5 times, and higher temperature could promote the broadening efficiency. Conclusion: It showed the method could be applied in multi-physical coupling calculation of reactor.

CLC Number:

• TL329.2