Macroscopic multigroup constants for accelerator driven system core calculations

The high-level wastes stored in facilities above ground or shallow repositories, in close connection with its nuclear power plant, can take almost 106 years before the radiotoxity became of the order of the background. While the disposal issue is not urgent from a technical viewpoint, it is recognized that extended storage in the facilities is not acceptable since these ones cannot provide sufficient isolation in the long term and neither is it ethical to leave the waste problem to future generations. A technique to diminish this time is to transmute these long-lived elements into short-lived elements. The approach is to use an Accelerator Driven System (ADS), a sub-critical arrangement which uses a Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), after separation the minor actinides and the long-lived fission products (LLFP), to convert them to short-lived isotopes. As an advanced reactor fuel, still today, there is a few data around these type of core systems. In this paper we generate macroscopic multigroup constants for use in calculations of a typical ADS fuel, take into consideration, the ENDF/BVI data file. Four energy groups are chosen to collapse the data from ENDF/B-VI data file by PREPRO code. A typical MOX fuel cell is used t

THEWASP Library Thermodynamic Water & Steam Properties Library in GPU.

In this paper we present a new library for thermodynamic evaluation of water properties, THEWASP. This library consists of a C++ and CUDA [13] based programs used to accelerate a function evaluation using GPU and GPU clusters. Global optimization problems need thousands of evaluations of the objective functions to find the global optimum implying in several days of expensive processing. This problem motivates us to seek a way to speed up our code, as well as to use MPI on Beowulf clusters [5] [17], which however increases the cost in terms of electricity, air conditioning and others. The GPU based programming can accelerate the implementation up to 100 times[7] and help increase the number of evaluations in global optimization problems using, for example, the PSO[8] or DE[15] Algorithms. THEWASP is based on Water-Steam formulations publish by the International Association for the properties of water and steam, Lucerne - Switzerland[2] [16], and provides several temperature and pressure function evaluations, such as specific heat, specific enthalpy, specific entropy and also some inverse maps. In this study we evaluated the gain in speed and performance and compared it a CPU based processing library

GPU-based high performance Monte Carlo simulation in neutron transport

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are high performance co-processors intended, originally, to improve the use and quality of computer graphics applications. Since researchers and practitioners realized the potential of using GPU for general purpose, their application has been extended to other elds out of computer graphics scope. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of using GPU in neutron transport simulation by Monte Carlo method. To accomplish that, GPU- and CPU-based (single and multicore) approaches were developed and applied to a simple, but time-consuming problem. Comparisons demonstrated that the GPU-based approach is about 15 times faster than a parallel 8-core CPU-based approach also developed in this work

Radiation monitoring system

Design of a portable low-power multichannel analyzer with wireless connectivity for remote radiation monitoring, powered from a solar panel with a internal battery to be operated in field. The multichannel analyzer is based on a single microcontroller which performs the digital functions and an analog signal processing board for implementing a Gaussian shaper preamplifier, a Gaussian stretcher, sample and hold, pile-up rejector and a 10 bit ADC. Now this design is to be used with a NaI(Ti) scintillator detector. This multichannel analyzer is designed to be a part of radiation monitoring network. All of them are connected, by radio in a radius of 10 kilometers, to a supervisor computer that collects data from the network of multichannel analyzers and numerically display the latest radiation measurements or graphically display measurements over time for all multichannel analyzers. Like: dose rate, spectra and operational status. Software also supports remotely configuring operating parameters (such as radiation alarm level) for each monitor independently

Desenvolvimento de algoritmos paralelos baseados em GPU para solução de problemas na área nuclear

Unidades de processamento gráfico ou GPUs, são co-processadores de alto desempenho destinados inicialmente a melhorar ou prover de capacidade gráfica um computador. Desde que pesquisadores e profissionais perceberam o potencial da utilização de GPU para fins gerais, a sua aplicação tem sido expandida a outras áreas fora do âmbito da computação gráfica. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é avaliar o impacto de utilização de GPU em dois problemas típicos da área nuclear. O transporte de nêutros utilizando simulação Monte Carlo e a resolução da equação do calor em um domínio bi-dimensional pelo método de diferenças finitas foram os problemas escolhidos. Para conseguir isso, desenvolvemos algorítmos paralelos para GPU e CPU nos dois problemas descritos anteriormente. A comparação demonstrou que a abordagem baseada em GPU é mais rápida do que a CPU em um computador com dois processadores quad core, sem perda de precisão nos resultados encontrado