DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF THE MODIFIED SIMPSON’S RULE FOR DISCRETE ORDINATES TRANSPORT APPLICATIONS

Department of Nuclear Engineering, North Carolina State University 2500 Stinson Drive, Campus Box 7909, Raleigh, NC 27695-7909, USA

xhu10@ncsu.edu
yyazmy@ncsu.edu

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

A new angular quadrature type termed Modified Simpson Trapezoidal (MST) is developed based on the conventional Simpson’s 1/3 rule where the angular pattern over polar levels has a trapezoid shape. An adaptive coefficient correction scheme is developed to enable our new quadrature to integrate the angular flux over subintervals separated by the interior jump irregularities. A two-dimensional test problem is employed to verify the angular discretization error in the uncollided S_N scalar flux computed with our new quadrature sets, as well as conventional angular quadrature types. Numerical results show that the MST quadrature error in the point-wise scalar flux converges with second order against increasing number of discrete angles, while the error obtained with other conventional quadrature types converges slower than first order depending on the regularity of the exact point-wise uncollided angular flux. In order to reduce the number of discrete points needed, a variant of the MST quadrature, namely MSTP30, is developed by using the Quadruple Range [1] polar quadrature with fixed 30 polar angles and applying the MST quadrature to the azimuthal dependence in each polar level. The angular discretization error in the point-wise S_N scalar flux obtained with MSTP30 sets converges with fourth order because the polar discretization error is sufficiently reduced that MSTP30 behaves like a one-dimensional quadrature. Furthermore, because MSTP30 computes the integral over subintervals that keep the true solution’s irregularity at the boundaries, this fourth order convergence rate is unaffected by such inevitable irregularities.