Multigrid preconditioning of the generator two-phase mixture balance equations in the Genepi software

In the framework of the two-phase fluid simulations of the steam generators of pressurized water nuclear reactors, we present in this paper a geometric version of a pseudo-Full MultiGrid (pseudo- FMG) Full Approximation Storage (FAS) preconditioning of balance equations in the GENEPI code. In our application, the 3D steady state flow is reached by a transient computation using a semi-implicit fractional step algorithm for the averaged two-phase mixture balance equations (mass, momentum and energy for the secondary flow). Our application, running on workstation clusters, is based on a CEA code-linker and the PVM package. The difficulties to apply the geometric FAS multigrid method to the momentum and mass balance equations are addressed. The use of a sequential pseudo-FMG FAS twogrid method for both energy and mass/momentum balance equations, using dynamic multigrid cycles, leads to perceptibly improvements in the computation convergences. An original parallel red-black pseudo-FMG FAS three-grid algorithm is presented too. The numerical tests (steam generator mockup simulations) underline the sizable increase in speed of convergence of the computations, essentially for the ones involving a large number of freedom degrees (about 100 thousand cells). The two-phase mixture balance equation residuals are quickly reduced: the reached speed-up stands between 2 and 3 following the number of grids. The effects on the convergence behavior of the numerical parameters are investigated