Application of FLUKA and OpenMC in coupled physics calculation of target and subcritical reactor for ADS

The study of accelerator-driven subcritical reactor systems (ADSs) has been an important research topic in the field of nuclear energy for years. The main code applied in ADS research is MCNPX, which was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory. We studied the application of the open-source Monte Carlo codes FLUKA and OpenMC to a coupled ADS calculation. The FLUKA code was used to simulate the reaction of high-energy protons with the nucleus of the target material in the ADS, which produces spallation neutrons. Information on the spallation neutrons, such as their energy, position, direction, and weight, can be recorded by a user-defined routine called FLUSCW provided by FLUKA. Then, the information was stored in an external neutron source file in HDF5 format by using a conversion code, as required by the OpenMC calculation. Finally, the fixed-source calculation function of OpenMC was applied to simulate the transport of spallation neutrons and obtain the distribution of the neutron flux in the core region. In the coupled calculation, the high-energy cross-section library JENDL4.0/HE in ACE format produced by NJOY2016 was applied in the OpenMC transport simulation. The OECD–ADS benchmark problem was calculated, and the results were compared with those obtained using MCNPX. It was found that the flux calculations performed by FLUKA–OpenMC and MCNPX were in agreement, so the coupling calculation method for ADS is reasonable and feasible.