Understanding units used in OpenMC tallies

Hi! I am new here and I am unsure how to start. I am doing a neutronic simulation that uses damage-energy tally and after a lot of tests (eliminating possible uncertainties) I am quite lost.

I have trouble doing dimensional analysis effectively as the units for different tallies was not obvious to me when I looked at 8. Specifying Tallies — OpenMC Documentation

I would really appreciate if it is added somewhere unless it is out there and I have yet to find it.

Other places I have tried to find this information are:
endf102_MT.pdf (oecd-nea.org)
<Other links omitted due to 2 link limit>

Welcome to the community, I also struggled with units when getting started with openmc.

I’m still keen to see if we can add units to the tally objects even if it is just for simple tallies. I understand it is hard to always know the units automatically but it would be great if we can provide units for the user in the simple case

anyway I’ve got a section of notes on units of flux and dpa if either of these are helpful.

I think this package has rusted so I can’t recommend relying on it but I made it when I was trying to understand if we could automatically find units, might be something useful there

1 Like

Hi Shimwell.

Thanks for the swift response. I have used the tool and understood that the units for flux is in neutrons per source. I am trying to understand how I can use that number to get cross section as I try verify the simple pure material case and work up to a compound material case and get a cross section spectra based on the source. I have limited my source to be monochromatic or single energy so that all of the numbers I see will be flux expected at those energies.

The literature that I am trying to replicate is Figure 8 of this paper:
1902.05620 (arxiv.org)

My current results are as shown. I am going back and forth between flux count and the damage-energy tallies trying to understand what kind of distribution I will get. From what I observe here, higher energy neutrons causes more interactions. At first glance it is intuitive but it seems that this is a flawed result. My guess at this moment is some kind of filtering will be needed. Do let me know your thoughts.


100k mean 100000 particles per batch which is a mean across 5 batches.
1M means 1000000 particles per batch which is a mean across 5 batches.