Advanced Nodal P3/SP3 Axial Transport Solvers for the MPACT 2D/1D Scheme
- ORNL
As part of its initiative to provide multiphysics simulations of nuclear reactor cores, the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) is developing the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications Core Simulator (VERA-CS). The MPACT code, which is the primary neutron transport solver of VERA-CS, employs the two-dimensional/one-dimensional (2D/1D) method to solve 3-dimensional neutron transport problems and provide sub-pin-level resolution of the power distribution. While 2D method of characteristics is used to solve for the transport effects within each plane, 1D-nodal methods are used axially. There have been extensive studies of the 2D/1D method with a variety nodal methods, and the P3/SP3 solver has proved to be an effective method of providing higher-fidelity solutions while maintaining a low computational burden.The current implementation in MPACT wraps a one-node nodal expansion method (NEM) kernel for each moment, iterating between them and performing multiple sweeps to resolve flux distributions. However, it has been observed that this approach is more sensitive to convergence problems. This paper documents the theory and application two new nodal P3/SP3 approaches to be used within the 2D/1D method in MPACT. These two approaches aim to provide enhanced stability compared with the pre-existing one-node approach. Results from the HY-NEM-SP3 solver show that the accuracy is consistent with the one-node formulations and provides improved convergence for some problems; but the solver has issues with cases in thin planes. Although the 2N-SENM-SP3 solver is still under development, it is intended to resolve the issues with HY-NEM-SP3 but it will incur some additional computational burden by necessitating an additional 1D-CMFD-P3 solver to generate the second moment cell-averaged scalar flux.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1223669
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: PHYSOR 2016, Sun Valley, ID, USA, 20160501, 20160505
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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