The comparison of MCNP perturbation technique with MCNP difference method in critical calculation Original Research Article

For a nuclear fission system, we calculated Δkeff, which arise from system material composition changes, by two different approaches, the MCNP perturbation technique and the MCNP difference method. For every material composition change, we made four different runs, each run with different cycles or each cycle generating different neutrons, then we compared the two Δkeff that are obtained by two different approaches. As a material composition change in any particular cell of the nuclear fission system is small compared to the material compositions in the whole nuclear fission system, in other words, this composition change can be treated as a small perturbation, the Δkeff results obtained from the MCNP perturbation technique are much quicker, much more efficient and reliable than the results from the MCNP difference method. When a material composition change in any particular cell of the nuclear fission system is significant compared to the material compositions in the whole nuclear fission system, both the MCNP perturbation technique and the MCNP difference method can give satisfactory results. But for the run with the same cycles and each cycle generating the same neutrons, the results obtained from the MCNP perturbation technique are systemically less than the results obtained from the MCNP difference method. To further confirm our calculation results from the MCNP4C, we run the exact same MCNP4C input file in MCNP5, the calculation results from MCNP5 are the same as the calculation results from MCNP4C. We need caution when using the MCNP perturbation technique to calculate the Δkeff as the material composition change is large compared to the material compositions in the whole nuclear fission system, even though the material composition changes of any particular cell of the fission system still meet the criteria of MCNP perturbation technique.