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Catching neutrons

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Jonathan Shimwell
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, United Kingdom
Submitted by Jonathan Shimwell on 11 November 2013

Hello all. 

Today I'm hunting for neutrons. The peasky little particles keep finding new ways of escaping from an otherwise great fusion reactor model (thanks for the model CCFE).

Neutrons simulation using MCNP

It takes my computer about 30 mins to produce 10 million neutrons and send them of in random directions throughout the reactor model using a code called MCNP.

Lost particles

The trouble is they keep finding tiny little gaps or cracks in the model geometry and escaping my virtual world. The model is made up of around 1500 blocks of various shapes and sizes and a few of them don't connect perfectly.

Luckily I've been granted a licence to use some rather helpful software. MCAM made by the FDS team is able to show where the neutrons are escaping from, all the images and videos in this blog post were generated with MCAM. This allows me to go back to the MCNP geometry and plug in the gaps.

I've uploaded a video and a few pictures of the model with particle tracks caused by lost particles to give you and idea of what I'm up to today.

The next step

Now that the neutrons are no longer escaping from the model it is time to see what they are getting up to. So tomorrow I shall be looking at how much tritium is created or how much heat energy they deposit.

Many thanks for reading my first blog post.