July 2024 News

  • A new tally system and an accompanying input syntax block have been added to Cardinal

  • The tally parameters found in OpenMCCellAverageProblem have been deprecated in favor of this new tally system.

    • Existing input files written with the previous tally syntax will no longer run

The main advantages of the new tally system is the ability to add multiple tallies with different spatial binning schemes for different scores. As an example, you can add a CellTally with a heating score and a MeshTally with a flux score:

[Problem<<<{"href": "../syntax/Problem/index.html"}>>>]
  type = OpenMCCellAverageProblem
  particles = 10000
  inactive_batches = 100
  batches = 1000
  initial_properties = xml
  verbose = true
  cell_level = 0

  power = 100.0

  source_rate_normalization = 'heating_local'

  [Tallies<<<{"href": "../syntax/Problem/Tallies/index.html"}>>>]
    [Mesh_Tally]
      type = MeshTally<<<{"description": "A class which implements unstructured mesh tallies.", "href": "../source/tallies/MeshTally.html"}>>>
      score<<<{"description": "Score(s) to use in the OpenMC tallies. If not specified, defaults to 'kappa_fission'"}>>> = 'flux'
    []
    [Cell_Tally]
      type = CellTally<<<{"description": "A class which implements distributed cell tallies.", "href": "../source/tallies/CellTally.html"}>>>
      score<<<{"description": "Score(s) to use in the OpenMC tallies. If not specified, defaults to 'kappa_fission'"}>>> = 'heating_local'
    []
  []
[]
(doc/content/source/actions/multi_tally_example.i)

Other advantages include:

  • Being able to specify tally triggers on a per-tally basis;

  • The option to apply block restrictions to different CellTally scores;

  • Additional flexibility when it comes to adding new tally filters in the future.