Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Verification of multilevel octree grid algorithm of SN transport calculation with the Balakovo-3 VVER-1000 neutron dosimetry benchmark

  • Cong Liu (Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics) ;
  • Bin Zhang (School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, North China Electric Power University) ;
  • Junxia Wei (Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics) ;
  • Shuang Tan (Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics)
  • Received : 2022.02.13
  • Accepted : 2022.10.15
  • Published : 2023.02.25
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Abstract

Neutron transport calculations are extremely challenging due to the high computational cost of large and complex problems. A multilevel octree grid algorithm (MLTG) of discrete ordinates method was developed to improve the modeling accuracy and simulation efficiency on 3-D Cartesian grids. The Balakovo-3 VVER-1000 neutron dosimetry benchmark is calculated to verify and validate this numerical technique. A simplified S2 synthetic acceleration is used in the MLTG calculation method to improve the convergence of the source iterations. For the triangularly arranged fuel pins, we adopt a source projection algorithm to generate pin-by-pin source distributions of hexagonal assemblies. MLTG provides accurate geometric modeling and flexible fixed source description at a lower cost than traditional Cartesian grids. The total number of meshes is reduced to 1.9 million from the initial 9.5 million for the Balakovo-3 model. The numerical comparisons show that the MLTG results are in satisfactory agreement with the conventional SN method and experimental data, within the root-mean-square errors of about 4% and 10%, respectively. Compared to uniform fine meshing, approximately 70% of the computational cost can be saved using the MLTG algorithm for the Balakovo-3 computational model.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12102062 and 12205020). Liu would also like to thank Dr. Wenhua Ma at IAPCM for his help in using the CMake tool and compiling the program.

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