DEMONSTRATION OF A LINEAR PROLONGATION CMFD METHOD ON MOC

¹ Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, University of Michigan 2355 Bonisteel Blvd., Ann Arbor, MI 48109
² School of Nuclear Engineering, Purdue University 400 Central Dr., West Lafayette, IN 47906
³ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University 201 W 19th Ave., Columbus, OH 43210

lijinthu@umich.edu
yunlin@purdue.edu
wang.12239@osu.edu
qicangsh@umich.edu
bkochuna@umich.edu
downar@umich.edu

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (CMFD) method is a very effective method to accelerate the iterations for neutron transport calculation. But it can degrade and even fail when the optical thickness of the mesh becomes large. Therefore several methods, including partial current-based CMFD (pCMFD) and optimally diffusive CMFD (odCMFD), have been proposed to stabilize the conventional CMFD method. Recently, a category of “higherorder” prolongation CMFD (hpCMFD) methods was proposed to use both the local and neighboring coarse mesh fluxes to update the fine cell flux, which can solve the fine cell scalar flux discontinuity problem between the fine cells at the bounary of the coarse mesh. One of the hpCMFD methods, refered as lpCMFD, was proposed to use a linear prolongation to update the fine cell scalar fluxes.

Method of Characteristics (MOC) is a very popular method to solve neutron transport equations. In this paper, lpCMFD is applied on the MOC code MPACT for a variety of fine meshes. A track-based centroids calculation method is introduced to find the centroids coordinates for random shapes of fine cells. And the numerical results of a 2D C5G7 problem are provided to demonstrate the stability and efficiency of lpCMFD method on MOC. It shows that lpCMFD can stabilize the CMFD iterations in MOC method effectively and lpCMFD method performs better than odCMFD on reducing the outer MOC iterations.