a b s t r a c t MONK Ò and MCBEND are Monte Carlo software packages for: nuclear criticality and reactor physics; and radiation shielding and dosimetry applications, respectively. The codes are actively developed, maintained and supported by AMEC's ANSWERS Ò Software Service in line with the ANSWERS vision of providing easy-to-use software that meets the current and emerging needs of the user community. This paper summarises the current status of MONK and MCBEND and the recent developments which have been carried out to the codes, and their supporting nuclear data libraries and visualisation package.
MCBEND 10 is the latest release of the general radiation transport Monte Carlo code from the ANSWERS Software Service of Serco Assurance. MCBEND is developed within a Nuclear Code Development (NCD) partnership between Serco Assurance and BNFL. The ANSWERS vision is 'to provide easy-to-use software that meets the current and emerging needs of the user community'. In the case of MCBEND, this vision focuses on the key areas of accuracy, understanding of uncertainties, efficiency and user-friendliness. MCBEND 10 is a major launch of the code with many new and enhanced features. New developments in MCBEND 10 include automatic splitting mesh generation, point energy adjoint for neutrons, calculation of uncertainty in the results due to material cross section uncertainties and a unified source facility. Enhanced features include improved temperature treatment, extended scoring of sensitivity to geometry perturbations, geometry improvements, extensions to formulae and improved user guide image. The user-friendliness of the MCBEND code has been further enhanced by recent developments to the visualisation tools, VISAGE and VISTA-RAY. Developments have been made to the three-dimensional visualisation tool, VISTA-RAY, to simplify the detailed checking of a model, with the option to use a mouse-pointer to select regions of interest for further detail and to visually highlight incorrectly defined areas. A further development to VISTA-RAY is the inclusion of the capability to overlay a representation of a user-designated set of results from a MCBEND analysis on the model. Improvements have also been made to the graphical user interface LaunchPad for submitting and controlling calculation submission, with a common user-image across all the systems. Recent enhancements to LaunchPad include a job-scheduler to simplify processing multiple tasks. A selection of the new developments in MCBEND 10, VISTA-RAY and LaunchPad will be described in this paper.
The goal of Visual Workshop is to be an 'Integrated Development Environment' for preparing, modifying, checking, running and analysing results from the shielding codes MCBEND [1] and RANKERN [2], the criticality code MONK [3], and the reactor physics/criticality code WIMS [4]. The functionality is being introduced in stages and this paper announces the release of version 2. The key features of Visual Workshop version 1 included interactive 2D and 3D ray trace display of the model using the same routines as the analysis code, wire frame display of the model, built in editing, running and diagnostic capabilities and a simple results display. The main additional capabilities of version 2 are: Results display using 2D cell plots, 2D contour plots and 3D iso-surface plots overlaid on the model geometry; and display of event type, location and particle tracks overlaid on the model geometry.
Reactor components (e.g. fuel assemblies) and other equipment (e.g. transport flasks) are designed using Computer Aided Design (CAD) packages. The process of converting CAD models into models that can be used in a Monte Carlo simulation is both time consuming and a source of approximations and errors. It is useful to be able to directly use these geometries in Monte Carlo calculations. MCBEND Version 11A Release Update 0 includes several methods of importing CAD geometries. The first method provides full accurate support for the range of geometry capabilities offered by the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES) model which can be used in combination with the existing geometry capabilities of MCBEND. All the surfaces in the IGES model are used directly with no approximation. This capability is provided by the OiNC software package developed by Sellafield Ltd as part of a Nuclear Code Development collaboration between Sellafield Ltd and the ANSWERS Software Service. A further two methods provide high performance CAD import options, but with a geometry approximation introduced by first converting the CAD file to a tetrahedral mesh representation or polygon surface representation, known as Standard Tessellation Language (STL), before importing them into MCBEND.
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