Finite moments approach to the time-dependent neutron transport equation

Abstract

Currently, nodal techniques are widely used in solving the multidimensional diffusion equation because of savings in computing time and storage. Thanks to the development of computer technology, one can now solve the transport equation instead of the diffusion equation to obtain more accurate solution. The finite moments method, one of the nodal methods, attempts to represent the fluxes in the cell and on cell surfaces more rigorously by retaining additional spatial moments. Generally, there are two finite moments schemes to solve the time-dependent transport equation. In one, the time variable is treated implicitly with finite moments method in space variable (implicit finite moments method), the other method uses finite moments method in both space and time (space-time finite moments method). In this study, these two schemes are applied to two types of time-dependent neutron transport problems. One is a fixed source problem, the other a heterogeneous fast reactor problem with delayed neutrons. From the results, it is observed that the two finite moments methods give almost the same solutions in both benchmark problems. However, the space-time finite moments method requires a little longer computing time than that of the implicit finite moments method. In order to reduce the longer computing time in the space-time finite moments method, a new iteration strategy is exploited, where a few time-stepwise calculation, in which original time steps are grouped into several coarse time divisions, is performed sequentially instead of performing iterations over the entire time steps. This strategy results in significant reduction of the computing time and we observe that 2-or 3-stepwise calculation is preferable. In addition, we propose a new finite moments method which is called mixed finite moments method in this thesis. Asymptotic analysis for the finite moments method shows that accuracy of the solution in a heterogeneous problem mainly depends on the accuracy of th...