Criticality Benchmarks for the Finite-Element-with-Discontiguous-Support Multigroup Method

This study compared the efficiency of the multigroup method to the finite-element-with-discontiguous-support multigroup method (FEDS) for discretizing the energy domain for radiation transport simulations. FEDS is similar to multigroup in that the energy domain is first partitioned into coarse groups, but is different than multigroup in that it further partitions the coarse groups into discontiguous energy elements within each coarse group. This paper presents a procedure for propagating uncertainties for FEDS, followed by two verification problems to test if the uncertainty propagation routines were implemented correctly. The absolute error in the verification problems were 6 x 10^-8 and 5 x 10^-8, respectively. Next the paper uses two criticality benchmarks which demonstrate that FEDS converges faster than multigroup to an energy-resolved solution. The absolute error in the two validations problems were 2 x 10^-4, and 4 x 10^-3, respectively. (authors)