plasma source for tokamaks

Dear OpemMC community

What are your thoughts on the inclusion of a plasma neutron source that could be used by people in the fusion community

There are some existing C++ routines with Fortran implementations for MCNP available on github

The equations are based on a paper from CEA and a plot of typical neutron space and energy distribution is attached.

tokamak_plasma.html (1.75 MB)

Hi Jon,

I would absolutely be interested to have this kind of capability in OpenMC. I’ll have a look at the paper and the github repo you linked to. As you may be aware, we don’t currently have toroidal surfaces implemented; will that be a showstopper for you? (just trying to get a sense of what are the most important things we are missing)

Thanks,
Paul

Hi Paul

Not to put words in Jon’s mouth, but yes toroidal surfaces are pretty critical for fusion systems. I was looking at doing this and contributing it back in, using the roundoff-proof algorithm for toroidal surface root finding (I’ll find link later). If you guys get to it before I do, all the better!

Thanks

Andy

Hi Paul

Just a quick update on this.

Andy has done some nice work on the energy distribution (Muir Gaussian sampling)

best,

Jon

Hello,

First off, thank you for this effort! I have installed your parametric_plasma_source python package and am able to generate source points and plot them, which is really great.

I’m now trying to use parametric_plasma_source as a source in OpenMC, but am running into an error. See message below:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::invalid_argument'
  what():  stod

I’m unfamiliar with this sort of error, could anyone help me out? The input for my settings is what is shown here. I am running in Ubuntu on WSL. Thanks!

Just wanted to mention Remi made a nice package for plasma sources.