Abstract
This paper evaluates the performance of multiphysics coupling algorithms applied to a light water nuclear reactor core simulation. The simulation couples the k-eigenvalue form of the neutron transport equation with heat conduction and subchannel flow equations. We compare Picard iteration (block Gauss-Seidel) to Anderson acceleration and multiple variants of preconditioned Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK). The performance of the methods are evaluated over a range of energy group structures and core power levels. A novel physics-based approximation to a Jacobian-vector product has been developed to mitigate the impact of expensive on-line cross section processing steps. Numerical simulations demonstrating the efficiency of JFNK and Anderson acceleration relative to standard Picard iteration are performed on a 3D model of a nuclear fuel assembly. Both criticality (k-eigenvalue) and critical boron search problems are considered.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 241-257 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Journal of Computational Physics |
Volume | 311 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 15 2016 |
Funding
Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. This research was supported by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors ( www.casl.gov ), an Energy Innovation Hub ( http://www.energy.gov/hubs ) for Modeling and Simulation of Nuclear Reactors under U.S. Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 . This research was supported by NSF Grant DMS-1406349 . 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 .
Keywords
- Anderson acceleration
- Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov
- Multiphysics
- Nuclear reactor analysis