Feasibility of wavelet expansion methods to treat the energy variable

This paper discusses the use of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to implement a functional expansion of the energy variable in neutron transport. The motivation of the work is to investigate the possibility of adapting the expansion level of the neutron flux in a material region to the complexity of the cross section in that region. If such an adaptive treatment is possible, 'simple' material regions (e.g., moderator regions) require little effort, while a detailed treatment is used for 'complex' regions (e.g., fuel regions). Our investigations show that in fact adaptivity cannot be achieved. The most fundamental reason is that in a multi-region system, the energy dependence of the cross section in a material region does not imply that the neutron flux in that region has a similar energy dependence. If it is chosen to sacrifice adaptivity, then the DWT method can be very accurate, but the complexity of such a method is higher than that of an equivalent hyper-fine group calculation. The conclusion is thus that, unfortunately, the DWT approach is not very practical. (authors)