The application of domain decomposition and Krylov subspace methods to reactor safety analysis
Abstract
The computational burden for fully implicit, three-dimensional fluid dynamics in nuclear reactor transient analysis can be prohibitive for the current generation of reactor system codes. The research here investigated advanced computational methods and parallel computing for three-dimensional reactor transient simulation. The methods developed here were demonstrated using the RETRAN-03 system analysis code. A nested GMRES solution scheme with domain decomposition preconditioning was developed for solving the RETRAN-03 linear systems resulting from fully implicit three-dimensional modeling. Its performance was examined in the analysis of a PWR steam line break accident with both 25 and 104-channel core models. Results from serial applications show that the computational burden can be reduced by well over an order of magnitude compared to the existing solution method. Speedups achieved from the parallel applications on a distributed memory multicomputer were modest primarily because of the message passing overhead.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Downar, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Nuclear physics|Computer science
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