Comparison of Non-overlapping and Overlapping Local/Global Iteration Schemes for Whole-Core Deterministic Transport Calculation

In the case of deterministic transport model, fixed-k problem formulation is necessary and the overlapping local domain is chosen. However, as mentioned in, the partial current-based Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (p-CMFD) procedure enables also non-overlapping local/global (NLG) iteration. In this paper, NLG iteration is combined with p-CMFD and with CMFD (augmented with a concept of p-CMFD), respectively, and compared to OLG iteration on a 2-D test problem. Non-overlapping local/global iteration with p-CMFD and CMFD global calculation is introduced and tested on a 2-D deterministic transport problem. The modified C5G7 problem is analyzed with both NLG and OLG methods and the solutions converge to the reference solution except for some cases of NLG with CMFD. NLG with CMFD gives the best performance if the solution converges. But if fission-source iteration in local calculation is not enough, it is prone to diverge. The p-CMFD global solver gives unconditional convergence (for both OLG and NLG). A study of switching scheme is in progress, where NLG/p-CMFD is used as 'starter' and then switched to NLG/CMFD to render the whole-core transport calculation more efficient and robust. Parallel computation is another obvious future work