https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201715306014
Radiation Transport in Random Media With Large Fluctuations
1 University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque ( USA )
2 Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque ( USA )
* e-mail: aolson@sandia.gov
** e-mail: prinja@unm.edu
*** e-mail: bcfrank@sandia.gov
Published online: 25 September 2017
Neutral particle transport in media exhibiting large and complex material property spatial variation is modeled by representing cross sections as lognormal random functions of space and generated through a nonlinear memory-less transformation of a Gaussian process with covariance uniquely determined by the covariance of the cross section. A Karhunen-Loève decomposition of the Gaussian process is implemented to effciently generate realizations of the random cross sections and Woodcock Monte Carlo used to transport particles on each realization and generate benchmark solutions for the mean and variance of the particle flux as well as probability densities of the particle reflectance and transmittance. A computationally effcient stochastic collocation method is implemented to directly compute the statistical moments such as the mean and variance, while a polynomial chaos expansion in conjunction with stochastic collocation provides a convenient surrogate model that also produces probability densities of output quantities of interest. Extensive numerical testing demonstrates that use of stochastic reduced-order modeling provides an accurate and cost-effective alternative to random sampling for particle transport in random media.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
