ON THE USE OF SERPENT MONTE CARLO CODE TO GENERATE FEW GROUP DIFFUSION CONSTANTS

The accuracy of diffusion reactor codes strongly depends on the quality of the group constants processing. For many years, the generation of such constants was based on 1-D infinity cell transport calculations. Some developments using collision probability or the method of characteristics allow, nowadays, 2-D assembly group constants calculations. However, these 1-D and 2-D codes show some limitations as, for example, on complex geometries and in the neighborhood of heavy absorbers. On the other hand, since Monte Carlo (MC) codes provide accurate neutron flux distributions, the possibility of using these solutions to provide group constants to full-core reactor diffusion simulators has been recently investigated, especially for the cases in which the geometry and reactor types are beyond the capability of the conventional deterministic lattice codes. The two greatest difficulties on the use of MC codes to group constant generation are the computational costs and the methodological incompatibility between analog MC particle transport simulation and deterministic transport methods based in several approximations. The SERPENT code is a 3-D continuous energy MC transport code with built-in burnup capability that was specially optimized to generate these group constants. In this work, we present the preliminary results of using the SERPENT MC code to generate 3-D two-group diffusion constants for a PWR like assembly. These constants were used in the CITATION diffusion code to investigate the effects of the MC group constants determination on the neutron multiplication factor diffusion estimate.