Domain decomposition and CMFD acceleration applied to discrete-ordinate methods for the solution of the neutron transport equation in XYZ geometries

A new development for the IDT solver is presented for large reactor core applications in XYZ geometries. The multigroup discrete-ordinate neutron transport equation is solved using a Domain-Decomposition (DD) method coupled with the Coarse-Mesh Finite Differences (CMFD). The later is used for accelerating the DD convergence rate. In particular, the external power iterations are preconditioned for stabilizing the oscillatory behavior of the DD iterative process. A set of critical 2-D and 3-D numerical tests on a single processor will be presented for the analysis of the performances of the method. The results show that the application of the CMFD to the DD can be a good candidate for large 3D full-core parallel applications. (author)