학술논문

Upsampling Monte Carlo Reactor Simulation Tallies in Depleted Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Assemblies Using a Convolutional Neural Network.
Document Type
Article
Source
Energies (19961073). May2024, Vol. 17 Issue 9, p2177. 26p.
Subject
*CONVOLUTIONAL neural networks
*FAST reactors
*ARTIFICIAL neural networks
*MONTE Carlo method
*LIGHT water reactors
*NUCLEAR reactors
Language
ISSN
1996-1073
Abstract
The computational demand of neutron Monte Carlo transport simulations can increase rapidly with the spatial and energy resolution of tallied physical quantities. Convolutional neural networks have been used to increase the resolution of Monte Carlo simulations of light water reactor assemblies while preserving accuracy with negligible additional computational cost. Here, we show that a convolutional neural network can also be used to upsample tally results from Monte Carlo simulations of sodium-cooled fast reactor assemblies, thereby extending the applicability beyond thermal systems. The convolutional neural network model is trained using neutron flux tallies from 300 procedurally generated nuclear reactor assemblies simulated using OpenMC. Validation and test datasets included 16 simulations of procedurally generated assemblies, and a realistic simulation of a European sodium-cooled fast reactor assembly was included in the test dataset. We show the residuals between the high-resolution flux tallies predicted by the neural network and high-resolution Monte Carlo tallies on relative and absolute bases. The network can upsample tallies from simulations of fast reactor assemblies with diverse and heterogeneous materials and geometries by a factor of two in each spatial and energy dimension. The network's predictions are within the statistical uncertainty of the Monte Carlo tallies in almost all cases. This includes test assemblies for which burnup values and geometric parameters were well outside the ranges of those in assemblies used to train the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]