• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.1143-1156
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• 2017

This paper describes recent development activities of the GENESIS code, which is a transport code for heterogeneous three-dimensional geometry, focusing on applications to reactor core analysis. For the treatment of anisotropic scattering, the concept of the simplified Pn method is introduced in order to reduce storage of flux moments. The accuracy of the present method is verified through a benchmark problem. Next, the iteration stability of the GENESIS code for the highly voided condition, which would appear in a severe accident (e.g., design extension) conditions, is discussed. The efficiencies of the coarse mesh finite difference and generalized coarse mesh rebalance acceleration methods are verified with various stabilization techniques. Use of the effective diffusion coefficient and the artificial grid diffusion coefficients are found to be effective to stabilize the acceleration calculation in highly voided conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.1403-1415
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• 2021

The transient capability of a SP₃ based pin-wise core analysis code SPHINCS is developed and verified through the analyses of the C5G7-TD benchmark. Spatial discretization is done by the fine mesh finite difference method (FDM) within the framework of the coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) formulation. Pin size fine meshes are used in the radial fine mesh kernels. The time derivatives of the odd moments in the time-dependent SP₃ equations are neglected. The pin homogenized group constants and Super Homogenization (SPH) factors generated from the 2D single assembly calculations at the unrodded and rodded conditions are used in the transient calculations via proper interpolation involving the approximate flux weighting method for the cases that involve control rod movement. The simplifications and approximations introduced in SPHINCS are assessed and verified by solving all the problems of C5G7-TD and then by comparing with the results of the direct whole core calculation code nTRACER. It is demonstrated that SPHINCS yields accurate solutions in the transient behaviors of core power and reactivity.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.73-84
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• 1981

B$\Phi$rrensen proposed a coarse mesh, three-dimensional one-and-half group diffusion scheme for computing the gross power distribution in light water reactors as an alternative to the conventional fine mesh finite difference approach in dealing with three dimensional problems, which require a prohibitively long computing time. The method reported takes extremely small execution time. However, its computational accuracy has not been investigated yet. The B$\Phi$rrensen method is revised in this work and both efficiency and accuracy are examined by applying it to IAEA benchmark problem and RIS$\Phi$ benchmark problem. It is found that two modifications on core-reflector boundary conditions and B$\Phi$rrensen's model constants may improve computational accuracy of power distribution calculation.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.56-61
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• 1989

A simple, approximate method for determining the two-group adjoint flux based on the Borresen's coarse-mesh 1.5 group diffusion theory scheme is proposed. With the principle of the 1.5 group diffusion theory scheme, the method describes the thermal leakage term of the adjoint flux approximately by the geomerical buckling determined from the fast adjoint flux. The accuracy of the adjoint flux is investigated tv the comparison of the adjoint flux constructed from this method with a fine-mesh finite-difference KIDD computations. It is shown that the proposed method can predict the adjoint flux as good as the KIDD results. Possible applications of the present method are then suggested in conjunction with the application of the perturbation theory.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.3543-3562
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• 2021

The methods and performance of a 3D pin-by-pin neutronics code based on the 2D/1D decoupling method are presented. The code was newly developed as an effort to achieve enhanced accuracy and high calculation performance that are sufficient for the use in practical nuclear design analyses. From the 3D diffusion-based finite difference method (FDM) formulation, decoupled planar formulations are established by treating pre-determined axial leakage as a source term. The decoupled axial problems are formulated with the radial leakage source term. To accelerate the pin-by-pin calculation, the two-level coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) formulation, which consists of the multigroup node-wise CMFD and the two-group assembly-wise CMFD is implemented. To enhance the accuracy, both the discontinuity factor method and the super-homogenization (SPH) factor method are examined for pin-wise cross-section homogenization. The parallelization is achieved with the OpenMP package. The accuracy and performance of the pin-by-pin calculations are assessed with the VERA and APR1400 benchmark problems. It is demonstrated that pin-by-pin 2D/1D alternating calculations within the two-level 3D CMFD framework yield accurate solutions in about 30 s for the typical commercial core problems, on a parallel platform employing 32 threads.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.267-280
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• 2009

In this paper we investigate a simple two-level additive Schwarz preconditioner for the P1 symmetric interior penalty Galerkin method of the Poisson equation on rectangular meshes. The construction is based on the decomposition of the global space of piecewise linear polynomials into the sum of local subspaces, each of which corresponds to an element of the underlying mesh, and the global coarse subspace consisting of piecewise constants. This preconditioner is a direct combination of the block Jacobi iteration and the cell-centered finite difference method, and thus very easy to implement. Explicit upper and lower bounds for the maximum and minimum eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix system are derived and confirmed by some numerical experiments.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.359-370
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• 1990

This study concerns with comparing low-dimensional reactor kinetics methods with a three-dimensional kinetics method to be used for safety analysis of light water reactors in order to suggest means of preparing input parameters required for low-dimensional methods. For this purpose a one-dimensional finite difference two-group diffusion theory code ODTRAN and a third-order Hermit polynomial-based point kinetics code POTRAN are developed and used to obtain low-dimensional solutions to the LRA-BWR kinetics benchmark problem. The results are compared with a three-dimensional modified Borresen's coarse-mesh solution of the kinetics problem by CMSNACK code. Through this comparison some simple but practical means of preparing input parameters of low-dimensional kinetics analysis methods are suggested.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.223-229
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• 2020

The present work proposes a solution to the static Boltzmann transport equation approximated by the simplified P₃ (SP₃) on angular, and the analytic coarse mesh finite difference (ACMFD) for spatial variables. Multi-group SP₃-ACMFD equations in 3D rectangular geometry are solved using the GMRES solution technique. As the core time dependent analysis necessitates the solution of an eigenvalue problem for an initial condition, this work is hence devoted to development and verification of the proposed static SP₃-ACMFD solver. A 3D multi-group static diffusion solver is also developed as a byproduct of this work to assess the improvement achieved using the SP₃ technique. Static results are then compared against transport benchmarks to assess the proximity of SP₃-ACMFD solutions to their full transport peers. Results prove that the approach can be considered as an acceptable interim approximation with outputs superior to the diffusion method, close to the transport results, and with the computational costs less than the full transport approach. The work would be further generalized to time dependent solutions in Part II.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.1347-1360
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• 2009

A multi-dimensional component for the thermal-hydraulic system analysis code, MARS, was developed for a more realistic three-dimensional analysis of nuclear systems. A three-dimensional and two-fluid model for a two-phase flow in Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates was employed. The governing equations and physical constitutive relationships were extended from those of a one-dimensional version. The numerical solution method adopted a semi-implicit and finite-difference method based on a staggered-grid mesh and a donor-cell scheme. The relevant length scale was very coarse compared to commercial computational fluid dynamics tools. Thus a simple Prandtl's mixing length turbulence model was applied to interpret the turbulent induced momentum and energy diffusivity. Non drag interfacial forces were not considered as in the general nuclear system codes. Several conceptual cases with analytic solutions were chosen and analyzed to assess the fundamental terms. RPI air-water and UPTF 7 tests were simulated and compared to the experimental data. The simulation results for the RPI air-water two-phase flow experiment showed good agreement with the measured void fraction. The simulation results for the UPTF downcomer test 7 were compared to the experiment data and the results from other multi-dimensional system codes for the ECC delivery flow.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.6
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• pp.531-546
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• 2011

The backward differentiation formula (BDF) method is applied to a three-dimensional reactor kinetics calculation for efficient yet accurate transient analysis with adaptive time step control. The coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) formulation is used for an efficient implementation of the BDF method that does not require excessive memory to store old information from previous time steps. An iterative scheme to update the nodal coupling coefficients through higher order local nodal solutions is established in order to make it possible to store only node average fluxes of the previous five time points. An adaptive time step control method is derived using two order solutions, the fifth and the fourth order BDF solutions, which provide an estimate of the solution error at the current time point. The performance of the BDF- and CMFD-based spatial kinetics calculation and the adaptive time step control scheme is examined with the NEACRP control rod ejection and rod withdrawal benchmark problems. The accuracy is first assessed by comparing the BDF-based results with those of the Crank-Nicholson method with an exponential transform. The effectiveness of the adaptive time step control is then assessed in terms of the possible computing time reduction in producing sufficiently accurate solutions that meet the desired solution fidelity.