Implementation of On-the-Fly Doppler Broadening in MCNP5 for Multiphysics Simulation of Nuclear Reactors

A new method to obtain Doppler broadened cross sections has been implemented into MCNP, removing the need to generate cross sections for isotopes at problem temperatures. Previous work had established the scientific feasibility of obtaining Doppler-broadened cross sections "on-the-fly" (OTF) during the random walk of the neutron. Thus, when a neutron of energy E enters a material region that is at some temperature T, the cross sections for that material at the exact temperature T are immediately obtained by interpolation using a high order functional expansion for the temperature dependence of the Doppler-broadened cross section for that isotope at the neutron energy E. A standalone Fortran code has been developed that generates the OTF library for any isotope that can be processed by NJOY. The OTF cross sections agree with the NJOY-based cross sections for all neutron energies and all temperatures in the range specified by the user, e.g., 250K - 3200K. The OTF methodology has been successfully implemented into the MCNP Monte Carlo code and has been tested on several test problems by comparing MCNP with conventional ACE cross sections versus MCNP with OTF cross sections. The test problems include the Doppler defect reactivity benchmark suite and two full-core VHTR configurations, including one with multiphysics coupling using RELAP5-3D/ATHENA for the thermal-hydraulic analysis. The comparison has been excellent, verifying that the OTF libraries can be used in place of the conventional ACE libraries generated at problem temperatures. In addition, it has been found that using OTF cross sections greatly reduces the complexity of the input for MCNP, especially for full-core temperature feedback calculations with many temperature regions. This results in an order of magnitude decrease in the number of input lines for full-core configurations, thus simplifying input preparation and reducing the potential for input errors. Finally, for full-core problems with multiphysics feedback, the memory required to store the cross section data is considerably reduced with OTF cross sections and the additional computational effort to use OTF cross sections is negligible. This is a joint project with the University of Michigan, Argonne National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory