VERIFICATION OF THE NUCLEAR COMPUTATIONAL CODES LEOPARD, WIMS, AND MCNP THROUGH COMPARISON WITH EXPERIMENTAL CRITICALITY DATA

Abstract

A lot of effort was devoted in the past to the development and to the validation of adequate neutron transport calculation codes for design calculation of nuclear reactors, and various accurate neutronic calculations have been performed using specific methods and nuclear data libraries. However, the frequent use of the existing code systems for calculations of reactors configurations requires a continuous and rigorous verification and validation of the quality of the results, especially when new nuclear data are used. This study aims to demonstrate the variations between the values obtained from computational codes LEOPARD, WIMS, and MCNP and the corresponding experimental results, as well as to evaluate the accuracy of the cross-section libraries utilized by each code. To achieve this, criticality experiments were chosen as the most appropriate benchmark for comparison. The study does not aim to declare a single code as the best or to undermine the significance of others, nor to exclude any code from consideration. Rather, it seeks to provide a comprehensive assessment of their performance. The results revealed very good performance across all codes, strong evidence of their reliability. This supports their use with a significant degree of confidence as essential tools for studying neutron applications.