Neutron importance in source-driven systems

A study of integral indicators of the neutron source importance in source-driven systems is carried out and their dependence on the phase-space characteristics of the neutron source is investigated in the first part of the paper. The second part is devoted to the analysis of the solution of the source-driven adjoint model, introducing different detectors as far as the spatial location and the energy is concerned. Spatial, angular and spectral effects are evidenced, solving the transport equation for a 2-dimensional x-y configuration in the multigroup SN approximation. Various definitions of the adjoint problem may be used in the interpretation of local flux measurements in source-driven subcritical systems and in the weighting procedures for the development of computational methods for transient analyses. The definition of the appropriate problem-dependent detector is still an open question and an object of discussion within the accelerator-driven system community. Some results showing the effects of different choices of the adjoint source on the effective mean neutron lifetime are illustrated. (authors)