Calculating k_eff during 0 power depletion steps

[doriangaboo]

Hi there,

I’m getting familiar with the depletion capabilities of OpenMC, and for the example I’m following part of the exercise is looking at the k_eff of a pincell during it’s cooling down period. I’ve realized that setting the power to 0, makes it so that OpenMC doesn’t run a transport calculation and thus will not do a k_eff eigenvalue calculation, at least by default.

I found this slightly older post in which the author used a very low magnitude power, 10^-10 W, to get close to 0 power and make OpenMC run a transport calculation, but has there been any features implemented since to force a transport calculation in spite of the 0 power time step?

Thanks!

Setting depletion power equal 0 to perform decay calculations stopped working

Hello. In the past, I used OpenMC 0.12 to perform some decay calculations as mentioned here, by setting power to 0. It calculated k-eff values for each decay step. Now, I have tried to repeat the same calculation using OpenMC 0.13.3 and it does perform any calculation. In the depletion_results file, k-eff is exactly 0 for all time steps. For it to work, I had to set power to a value like 0.0000000001. This way the code performs k-eff calculations along decay. Is that an intended change? It is…