A high-order method for the integration of the Galerkin semi-discretized nuclear reactor kinetics equations

Thesis/Dissertation · Fri Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1988

OSTI ID:6994956

Vargas, L

The numerical approximate solution of the space-time nuclear reactor kinetics equation is investigated using a finite-element discretization of the space variable and a high order integration scheme for the resulting semi-discretized parabolic equation. The Galerkin method with spatial piecewise polynomial Lagrange basis functions are used to obtained a continuous time semi-discretized form of the space-time reactor kinetics equation. A temporal discretization is then carried out with a numerical scheme based on the Iterated Defect Correction (IDC) method using piecewise quadratic polynomials or exponential functions. The kinetics equations are thus solved with in a general finite element framework with respect to space as well as time variables in which the order of convergence of the spatial and temporal discretizations is consistently high. A computer code GALFEM/IDC is developed, to implement the numerical schemes described above. This issued to solve a one space dimensional benchmark problem. The results of the numerical experiments confirm the theoretical arguments and show that the convergence is very fast and the overall procedure is quite efficient. This is due to the good asymptotic properties of the numerical scheme which is of third order in the time interval.

• Research Organization: California Univ., Berkeley, CA (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6994956
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

651000* -- Nuclear Physics
653003 -- Nuclear Theory-- Nuclear Reactions & Scattering
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200 -- Mathematics & Computers
CALCULATION METHODS
COMPUTER CODES
DATA
EQUATIONS
GALERKIN-PETROV METHOD
INFORMATION
ITERATIVE METHODS
KINETICS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
NUCLEAR REACTION KINETICS
NUMERICAL DATA
NUMERICAL SOLUTION
REACTION KINETICS
REACTOR KINETICS EQUATIONS
SPACE-TIME
THEORETICAL DATA