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

Journal Article · Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Journal of Computational Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JCP.2015.01.029· OSTI ID:22465617

Philip, Bobby ^[1]; Berrill, Mark A.; Allu, Srikanth; Hamilton, Steven P.; Sampath, Rahul S.; Clarno, Kevin T. ^[1]; Dilts, Gary A. ^[2]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37831 (United States)
2. Los Alamos National Laboratory, PO Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545 (United States)

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.

• OSTI ID: 22465617
• Journal Information: Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 286; Other Information: Copyright (c) 2015 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9991
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
97 MATHEMATICAL METHODS AND COMPUTING
ALGORITHMS
CALCULATION METHODS
COMPUTER CODES
FUEL RODS
HEAT TRANSFER
NONLINEAR PROBLEMS
NUCLEAR FUELS
RADIATION TRANSPORT
TRANSPORT THEORY
VALIDATION