Grid and basis adaptive polynomial chaos techniques for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis

The demand for accurate and computationally affordable sensitivity and uncertainty techniques is constantly on the rise and has become especially pressing in the nuclear field with the shift to Best Estimate Plus Uncertainty methodologies in the licensing of nuclear installations. Besides traditional, already well developed methods – such as first order perturbation theory or Monte Carlo sampling – Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) has been given a growing emphasis in recent years due to its simple application and good performance. This paper presents new developments of the research done at TU Delft on such Polynomial Chaos (PC) techniques. Our work is focused on the Non-Intrusive Spectral Projection (NISP) approach and adaptive methods for building the PCE of responses of interest. Recent efforts resulted in a new adaptive sparse grid algorithm designed for estimating the PC coefficients. The algorithm is based on Gerstner's procedure for calculating multi-dimensional integrals but proves to be computationally significantly cheaper, while at the same it retains a similar accuracy as the original method. More importantly the issue of basis adaptivity has been investigated and two techniques have been implemented for constructing the sparse PCE of quantities of interest. Not using the traditional full PC basis set leads to further reduction in computational time since the high order grids necessary for accurately estimating the near zero expansion coefficients of polynomial basis vectors not needed in the PCE can be excluded from the calculation. Moreover the sparse PC representation of the response is easier to handle when used for sensitivity analysis or uncertainty propagation due to the smaller number of basis vectors. The developed grid and basis adaptive methods have been implemented in Matlab as the Fully Adaptive Non-Intrusive Spectral Projection (FANISP) algorithm and were tested on four analytical problems. These show consistent good performance both in terms of the accuracy of the resulting PC representation of quantities and the computational costs associated with constructing the sparse PCE. Basis adaptivity also seems to make the employment of PC techniques possible for problems with a higher number of input parameters (15–20), alleviating a well known limitation of the traditional approach. The prospect of larger scale applicability and the simplicity of implementation makes such adaptive PC algorithms particularly appealing for the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of complex systems and legacy codes