Geometry navigation acceleration based on automatic neighbor search and oriented bounding box in monte carlo simulation

Geometry navigation plays the most fundamental role in Monte Carlo particle transport simulation. It's mainly responsible for locating a particle inside which geometry volume it is and computing the distance to the volume boundary along the certain particle trajectory during each particle history. Geometry navigation directly affects the run-time perform- ance of the Monte Carlo particle transport simulation, especially for large scale compli- cated systems. Two geometry acceleration algorithms, the automatic neighbor search al- gorithm and the oriented bounding box algorithm, are presented for improving geometry navigation performance. The algorithms have been implemented in the Super Monte Carlo Calculation Program for Nuclear and Radiation Process (SuperMC) version 2.0. The FDS-II and ITER benchmark models have been tested to highlight the efficiency gains that can be achieved by using the acceleration algorithms. The exact gains may be problem dependent, but testing results showed that runtime of Monte Carlo simulation can be considerably reduced 50%~60% with the proposed acceleration algorithms.