Automatic Generation of 3D Fine Mesh Geometries for the Analysis of the VENUS-3 Shielding Benchmark Experiment with the TORT Code

In many practical radiation transport applications today the cost for solving refined, large size and complex three-dimensional (3D) problems is not so much computing but is linked to the effort required by an expert to prepare the model, verify and validate that it is correct and represents to a specified tolerance the real design or facility. This becomes particularly cumbersome for detailed reactor core or shield descriptions. The need for developing tools that facilitate the task to the physicist or engineer, by reducing the lime required, by facilitating through effective graphical display the verification of correctness, and finally that help the interpretation of the results obtained has clearly emerged, in particular, for 3D general purpose radiation transport codes. Such tools will facilitate computations requiring a very large number of meshes and high performance computers.The present paper shows the results of efforts in this field. In particular, the reliability of the BOT3P pre-post-processor system of programs, originally developed at the Nuclear Data Centre in ENEA Bologna and dedicated to the DORT (2D) and TORT (3D) discrete ordinates transport codes, was tested in the context of a 3D analysis of the VENUS-3 (SCK/CEN-Mol, Belgium) neutron shielding benchmark experiment performed with the TORT code.