• 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.46 no.6
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• pp.783-796
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• 2014

The coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) method is applied to the discontinuous finite element method based discrete ordinate calculation for source convergence acceleration. The three-dimensional (3-D) DFEM-Sn code FEDONA is developed for general geometry applications as a framework for the CMFD implementation. Detailed methods for applying the CMFD acceleration are established, such as the method to acquire the coarse mesh flux and current by combining unstructured tetrahedron elements to rectangular coarse mesh geometry, and the alternating calculation method to exchange the updated flux information between the CMFD and DFEM-Sn. The partial current based CMFD (p-CMFD) is also implemented for comparison of the acceleration performance. The modified p-CMFD method is proposed to correct the weakness of the original p-CMFD formulation. The performance of CMFD acceleration is examined first for simple two-dimensional multigroup problems to investigate the effect of the problem and coarse mesh sizes. It is shown that smaller coarse meshes are more effective in the CMFD acceleration and the modified p-CMFD has similar effectiveness as the standard CMFD. The effectiveness of CMFD acceleration is then assessed for three-dimensional benchmark problems such as the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and C5G7MOX problems. It is demonstrated that a sufficiently converged solution is obtained within 7 outer iterations which would require 175 iterations with the normal DFEM-Sn calculations for the IAEA problem. It is claimed that the CMFD accelerated DFEM-Sn method can be effectively used in the practical eigenvalue calculations involving general geometries.