A Source Biasing and Variance Reduction Technique for Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Modeling of Emission Tomography Problems
Abstract
A numerical radiation transport methodology for predicting gamma emission tomographs was developed utilizing the deterministic fuel burn-up software, ORIGEN, in the SCALE code package as a source definition input for Monte Carlo N Particle Transport ver. 6.1 to simulate gamma emission spectra from irradiated nuclear fuel and measured by an inorganic scintillator detector. Variance reduction utilized analytical expressions for the solid angle and field of view between source, collimator and detector to normalize the gamma energy spectrum from a non-analog monodirectionally biased beam source problem to approximate the equivalent analog problem of an isotropic source. One normalization scheme, which assumes that the source is distributed in a thin cylindrical volume, can achieve lower than 6% error and an order of 107 reduction in the computational cost. A different normalization scheme involving a truncated cone source distribution overestimated the count rate by approximately 45% but had similar computational savings. In both approaches, the accuracy and computational savings of the method improves with increasing collimator aspect ratio. This method is therefore useful for problems with high aspect ratio collimators.
Recommended Citation
S. Kilby et al., "A Source Biasing and Variance Reduction Technique for Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Modeling of Emission Tomography Problems," Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, vol. 320, no. 1, pp. 37 - 45, Springer Netherlands, Apr 2019.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-019-06457-1
Department(s)
Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science
Keywords and Phrases
Monte-Carlo N Particle Transport (MCNP); Oak Ridge Isotope Generation (ORIGEN); Variance Reduction
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
0236-5731; 1588-2780
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2019 Akadémiai Kiadó, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Apr 2019
Comments
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy University Programs, Project 17-13011, and by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Education Program under Award NRC-HQ-13-G-38-0026.