Revisiting the TORT solutions to the nea suite of benchmarks for 3D transport methods and codes over a range in parameter space

Improved TORT solutions to the 3D transport codes' suite of benchmarks exercise are presented in this study. Preliminary TORT solutions to this benchmark indicate that the majority of benchmark quantities for most benchmark cases are computed with good accuracy, and that accuracy improves with model refinement. However, TORT fails to compute accurate results for some benchmark cases with aspect ratios drastically different from 1, possibly due to ray effects. In this work, we employ the standard approach of splitting the solution to the transport equation into an uncollided flux and a fully collided flux via the code sequence GRTUNCL3D and TORT to mitigate ray effects. The results of this code sequence presented in this paper show that the accuracy of most benchmark cases improved substantially. Furthermore, the iterative convergence problems reported for the preliminary TORT solutions have been resolved by bringing the computational cells' aspect ratio closer to unity and, more importantly, by using 64-bit arithmetic precision in the calculation sequence. Results of this study are also reported.