Time Implicit Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme for 3D Multi-Group Neutron Transport Simulation

Time Implicit Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme for 3D Multi-Group Neutron Transport Simulation

Year:    2020

Author:    Shuang Tan, Wenjun Sun, Kun Xu, Junxia Wei, Guoxi Ni

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 28 (2020), Iss. 3 : pp. 1189–1218

Abstract

In this paper, a time implicit unified gas kinetic scheme (IUGKS) for 3D multi-group neutron transport equation with delayed neutron is developed. The explicit scheme, implicit 1st-order backward Euler scheme, and 2nd-order Crank-Nicholson scheme, become the subsets of the current IUGKS. In neutron transport, the microscopic angular flux and the macroscopic scalar flux are fully coupled in an implicit way with the combination of dual-time step technique for the convergence acceleration of unsteady evolution. In IUGKS, the computational time step is no longer limited by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition, which improves the computational efficiency in both steady and unsteady simulations with a large time step. Mathematically, the current scheme has the asymptotic preserving (AP) property in recovering automatically the diffusion solution in the continuum regime. Since the explicit scanning along neutron traveling direction within the computational domain is not needed in IUGKS, the scheme can be easily extended to multi-dimensional and parallel computations. The numerical tests demonstrate that the IUGKS has high computational efficiency, high accuracy, and strong robustness when compared with other schemes, such as the explicit UGKS, the commonly used finite difference, and finite volume methods. This study shows that the IUGKS can be used faithfully to study neutron transport in practical engineering applications.

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Journal Article Details

Publisher Name:    Global Science Press

Language:    English

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2019-0050

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 28 (2020), Iss. 3 : pp. 1189–1218

Published online:    2020-01

AMS Subject Headings:    Global Science Press

Copyright:    COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press

Pages:    30

Keywords:    UGKS neutron transport time implicit scheme.

Author Details

Shuang Tan

Wenjun Sun

Kun Xu

Junxia Wei

Guoxi Ni