A New Method for the Calculation of Diffusion Coefficients with Monte Carlo

Aalto University, School of Science, Espoo, Finland

^* eric.dorval@aalto.fi

Abstract

This paper presents a new Monte Carlo-based method for the calculation of diffusion coefficients. One distinctive feature of this method is that it does not resort to the computation of transport cross sections directly, although their functional form is retained. Instead, a special type of tally derived from a deterministic estimate of Fick’s Law is used for tallying the total cross section, which is then combined with a set of other standard Monte Carlo tallies. Some properties of this method are presented by means of numerical examples for a multi-group 1-D implementation. Calculated diffusion coefficients are in general good agreement with values obtained by other methods.