Demonstration of OpenMC as a framework for atomic transport and plasma interaction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that OpenMC, originally designed for neutron and photon transport, can be effectively adapted for atomic transport and plasma interaction modeling, showing comparable accuracy and performance to existing tools like DEGAS2.

Contribution

The work shows that OpenMC can be used for atomic transport calculations, expanding its application scope beyond neutron and photon transport.

Findings

OpenMC's atomic transport accuracy is comparable to DEGAS2.

OpenMC performs well without heterogeneous computing architectures.

The adaptation of OpenMC for plasma interactions is feasible and effective.

Abstract

Modern tooling is demanded for predicting the transport and reaction characteristics of atoms and molecules, especially in the context of magnetic confinement fusion. DEGAS2, among the most common and capable tools currently in use, shares many fundamental similarities with the OpenMC framework, which was primarily developed for neutron and photon transport. In this work, we demonstrate that OpenMC is suitable for atomic transport calculations. The relative error between the models is small, and the performance of OpenMC is at least comparable to DEGAS2. This is the case even without taking advantage of heterogeneous computing architecture, which is only one of the several remarkable new capabilities that this demonstration heralds.