Application of the finite-element Petrov-Galerkin formulation to the thermal hydraulic analysis of PWRs with linear system equation solution

This paper presents a new compute code for PWR thermohydraulic analysis in microcomputers. The code employs Petrov-Galerkin formulations of finite elements for spatial discretization and a direct solution approach of the resulting matrices of the subchannel equations which allows the solution considering a great number os subchannels. The results generated so far are closer to those obtained by the COBRA-IV-I code. A great advantage observed relates to the memory allocation saving. In this way, this code is quite adequate for thermohydraulic analyses in microcomputers. (author)