Mesh production workflow¶

Cubit can be used to generate the unstructured meshes needed for tallies. To do so, use the following steps.

1. Load the geometry you wish to mesh into Cubit.

2. Use the mesh tools to produce the meshes you want.

3. Save the file as a .cub file. Remember to check the “Use Legacy .cub file Format” option in Cubit.

4. Use MOAB’s mbconvert executable to convert from the Cubit format to a faceted .h5m file that DAGMC can use.

Here is an example of how to use mbconvert:

$ mbconvert mesh.cub mesh.h5m

One can immediately view this mesh, by using mbconvert to convert to vtk:

$ mbconvert mesh.h5m mesh.vtk

Tetrahedral mesh tallies¶

Currently the tetmesh tally option is only available in DAG-MCNP5/6, but there are plans to expand this to all the codes that DAGMC currently supports.

Once you have used the above instructions to produce one or more meshes in .h5m format, you must specify to MCNP that your tally is a tetmesh tally. This is done by putting special keywords on the tally comment (FC) line. For example, adding the following lines to an MCNP input file would tell MCNP that tally 4 is a tetmesh tally, that the input mesh file is mesh.h5m, and the results should be stored in mesh_out.h5m.

fmesh4:n geom=dag
fc4 dagmc type=unstr_track inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m

Other standard MCNP options can also be used, such as energy bins:

fmesh4:n geom=dag
         emesh=1.0 2.0 15.0
fc4 dagmc type=unstr_track inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m

Or tally multipliers:

fmesh4:p geom=dag
fc4 dagmc type=unstr_track inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m
fm4 -1 0 -5 -6

mbconvert can be used to convert the output mesh file to a .vtk file for viewing or post-processing with VisIt or ParaView or other plotting tools.

$ mbconvert mesh_out.h5m mesh_out.vtk

Kernel density estimator tallies¶

The kernel density estimator tallies are a suite of tallies that allow scoring to be done using the vertices of a tetmesh or add additional mesh-based scoring such as collision estimator tallies. The theoretical details behind KDE tallies can be found in Kerry Dunn’s Ph.D. thesis.

To call a KDE collision tally, use:

fmesh4:p geom=dag
fc4 dagmc type=kde_coll inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m
    hx=0.198 hy=0.0663 hz=0.0662

To call a KDE track length tally, use:

fmesh4:p geom=dag
fc4 dagmc type=kde_track inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m
    hx=0.198 hy=0.0663 hz=0.0662

To call a KDE subtrack tally, use:

fmesh4:p geom=dag
fc4 dagmc type=kde_subtrack inp=mesh.h5m out=mesh_out.h5m
    hx=0.1042 hy=0.0833 hz=0.0833
    hx=0.1042 hy=0.0833 hz=0.0833
    subtracks=3 seed=11699913