A parallel multi-domain solution methodology applied to nonlinear thermal transport problems in nuclear fuel pins

Bobby Philip, Mark A. Berrill, Srikanth Allu, Steven P. Hamilton, Rahul S. Sampath, Kevin T. Clarno, Gary A. Dilts

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper describes an efficient and nonlinearly consistent parallel solution methodology for solving coupled nonlinear thermal transport problems that occur in nuclear reactor applications over hundreds of individual 3D physical subdomains. Efficiency is obtained by leveraging knowledge of the physical domains, the physics on individual domains, and the couplings between them for preconditioning within a Jacobian Free Newton Krylov method. Details of the computational infrastructure that enabled this work, namely the open source Advanced Multi-Physics (AMP) package developed by the authors is described. Details of verification and validation experiments, and parallel performance analysis in weak and strong scaling studies demonstrating the achieved efficiency of the algorithm are presented. Furthermore, numerical experiments demonstrate that the preconditioner developed is independent of the number of fuel subdomains in a fuel rod, which is particularly important when simulating different types of fuel rods. Finally, we demonstrate the power of the coupling methodology by considering problems with couplings between surface and volume physics and coupling of nonlinear thermal transport in fuel rods to an external radiation transport code.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)143-171
Number of pages29
JournalJournal of Computational Physics
Volume286
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1 2015

Funding

The AMP (Advanced Multi-Physics) code is distributed with a modified BSD license and accessible either by contacting the corresponding author or through the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with an RSICC license, as CCC-793. The development of AMP, and the nuclear fuel performance application built upon it, was funded by the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office. This material is also based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy , Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Applied Mathematics program, Extreme Scale Solvers project (EASIR). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 . Mark Berrill acknowledges support from the Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 .

Keywords

  • Domain decomposition
  • Inexact Newton
  • Iterative method
  • Jacobian free Newton Krylov
  • Krylov subspace method
  • Parallel algorithm
  • Preconditioning

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